A Little Intro to Mousterian Stuff

[uniface]

Evolution of Modern Humans:* Archaic Human Culture

A few tools : http://www.kochi-tech.ac.jp/akazawa/images/048.jpg

FWIW

[flintchip]

This is a good read, thanks for posting the link.

[DesertWalker]

Nice article about European artifacts.

[rokdok]

Compare this artifact to the third from left in the first row. Let me clarify this, i am not saying that Neanderthals were here, however, based on tools and cores i have personally found, i do believe someone was making Levallois tools here at some point in time, and since they are not described in Clovis or later cultures in the hundreds of thousands of professional archeological excavations done in the East, well..... Scalpel indicates bulb of percussion.

[comanche]

Thanks UNI///c

[uniface]

At the heart of this is the 180-degree difference in approach between the Mousterian and subsequent knapping strategies.

The result is that when people familiar with the later approach, and thinking in terms of it, look at artifacts produced by the older technology, not seeing what they're looking for, they dismiss them as waste flakes, frost splits and such -- non artifacts.

The article on re-creating a Scottsbluff point on the home page(s) here is a good example of the later approach : starting with a big piece of chert and removing hundreds of flakes from it until what results is a Scottsbluff point and a lot of "waste flakes." This approach to making a point, a tool &c. is what people assume must have been the case earlier, but wasn't.

Jacques Bordaz, Tools of the Old and New Stone Age (American Museum of Natural History/Dover Books, 1959). p. 39 :

". . . [i]nstead of trying to get one, or at best two or three flakes of maximum length, the Mousterian knappers concentrated on getting the maximum number of usable flakes."

Flakes were what they set out to produce.

This might be an inside-out way of looking at it, but it's the one that corresponds with the record.

FWIW

[DesertWalker]

Just curious Uni, have you ever done any knapping or been to a "quarry" site? I have been to several quarry sites where debitage is scattered on the ground for miles around them

[uniface]

Hi DW

Yes and yes. The scatter didn't extend for miles though.

[Mojave]

Originally Posted by uniface

Hi DW

Yes and yes. The scatter didn't extend for miles though.

Don't mean to argue but I've been in sites that extended many miles. Tens of miles in some cases...

[uniface]

Fine with me.

Quarry sites I've been familiar with weren't that extensive.

Then again, there are trails in Penna. from South Mountain going in several directions that are paved with rhyolite flakes, so they tell me.