Establishing the integrity and stratigraphic origin of stone artefact scatters on the surface of the Lake Mungo lunette in south-eastern Australia

Abstract

Refitting is routinely employed to investigate the techniques used to make and modify stone tools, to assess the impact of post-depositional processes on archaeological assemblages and to identify the locations of task-specific activities. However, it is rarely used to facilitate the study of surface archaeological assemblages, despite its obvious potential for assessing the impact of post-exposure processes on artefacts strewn across the surfaces of eroding landforms. During a recent survey of in situ archaeological traces exposed on the surface of the Lake Mungo lunette in south-eastern Australia, the presence of refitting artefacts, and flakes arguably struck from the same block of raw material, have been used to identify surface assemblages that retain behavioural integrity even though their encasing sediment has been removed. Analysis of the distribution of these artefacts in relation to each other and to stratigraphic and topographic boundaries provides a way of distinguishing lag and/or transported assemblages from those which lie on the surface of the stratigraphic unit from which they originated.