How Surprising are Lithic Reduction Strategies? The Information Entropy of the Modes A-I Framework

ABSTRACT

How surprising are the contents of lithic assemblages? If an archeologist excavated an archeological site somewhere in Eurasia and uncovered evidence of Levallois core technology, how surprising would it be? The surprise in the content of a new assemblage is a function of what is underground as well as our prior knowledge about prehistory. How improved is our understanding of the past when another site is excavated? The answer is a measure of the information contained in lithic assemblages. We present a primer on information theory, which provides tools necessary to conceptualize, measure, and analyze information. We then apply the theory by measuring the information contained in a large comparative dataset describing the presence or absence of technological modes across Late Pleistocene modern human assemblages. We find that technological modes tend to have little conditional dependency with one another, suggesting that lithic assemblages do have relatively high information content.

KEYWORDS:

• Information theory
• mode A-I
• entropy
• stone tools
• lithic
• technology

Disclosure statement

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

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Jonathan Paige

Jonathan Paige is an Archaeological Research Scientist at the Center for Archaeological Research at University of Texas, San Antonio, and a doctoral candidate in Anthropology at Arizona State University. He studies how lithic technologies evolve, and how technologies relate to the evolution of hominin brain size, life history and cultural abilities. To address these issues, he takes a theoretically-informed, computational approach involving comparisons of thousands of archaeological assemblages spanning the past 3 million years of human evolution.

Charles Perreault

Charles Perreault is an archaeologist, with a PhD in Anthropology from the University of California, Los Angeles. His academic interests include cultural evolution in both taphonomic and behavioral contexts, as well as lithic technology. He is currently an Associate Professor at the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a Research Scientist at the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State University.