Lithics: Chipped Stones and Debitage Assemblages

Abstract

Chipped stone tools are the most abundant remains of human presence in prehistory. Their variability and evolution are due to multiple factors. Some of the most important are the availability of raw materials, which bears on the quality of the toolkits given the resources available in the landscape, and human evolution, cognition, technological development, cultural complexity, and social identity. Because of this and given the heavy dependence of humans on stone tools, toolkits changed rapidly when conditions changed, and remained relatively stable when conditions were stable. After a century of investigation, today's laboratory procedures allow researchers to search, find and pinpoint the main features of these tools across vast regions and, within each region, across time, with great confidence. This is done with such precision that it is frequently possible to know the provenance of each raw material, to infer the function of archaeological sites, and to determine for which tasks each stone tool was used. In this entry, we present an overview of these assemblages and their meaning, and up-to-date ways of studying them.