Analyzing skill in lithic dispersions using width, thickness and width-by-thickness ratio

ABSTRACT

Lithic dispersions are spreads of various shapes (e.g. tools, preforms, cores, flakes, blades) that have been discarded by stone knappers at similar or various steps of their development. They extend beyond archaeologists’ chronological and spatial boundaries. They hold information on past techniques and practices. To explore that information, archaeologists need to work through the various processes that shaped lithic dispersions. I argue that skill is a process that can help reframe stone knapping to better take into account the dispersion that stone knappers generate. I show how width, thickness and width-by-thickness (W/T) ratios can be used to understand how knappers enacted various levels of skill while working their various bifacial preforms at the dense plowed site of La Martre (Quebec, Canada). This points at ways that archaeologists can work outside of culture-historical, cognitive or mechanistic frameworks to explore past social practices where spatial and chronological control is lacking.

KEYWORDS:

• Lithic dispersion
• skill
• bifacial technology
• plowed fields
• Paleoindian archaeology

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank Adrian Burke and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Additional maps and figures have been published elsewhere (Kolhatkar, 2022, Figures 1–6).

Additional information

Funding

This research did not receive any specific grant from funding agencies in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.

Notes on contributors

Manek Kolhatkar

Manek Kolhatkar holds a PhD in Anthropology from the Université de Montréal. He has been working at various CRM archaeological firms in Quebec since 2006. He was a visiting researcher at Université de Montréal, département d’Anthropologie, from 2020 to 2021. He is a postdoctoral fellow at Université de Sherbrooke, Département de Philosophie et d’Éthique Appliquée and Archéo-Mamu Côte-Nord (an Indigenous-settler non-profit cultural organization).