A New Method of Refitting Mixture Lithic Materials by Geometric Matching of Flake Surfaces

Abstract

In Japan, lithic materials are very important evidences of human activity research in the Palaeolithic and Jomon periods, while refitting lithic materials is a complex and hard task. In our previous research, it is possible to refit lithic materials from a single stone core, while it is impossible to refit them from multiple stone cores. This paper proposes a new method for refitting mixture lithic materials by matching flake surfaces. Each of the input point clouds of lithic materials is segmented and simplified to obtain flake surfaces. Then, according to several refitting principles in archeology, the lithic materials are matched starting from a stone core by searching the best matching flake surface. The flake surfaces of matched lithic materials are reconstructed, and the matching process is repeated until all data are matched. The implementation of the new method can obtain good refitting results for experimental examples.