Abstract
In prehistoric human populations, technologies played a fundamental role in the acquisition of different resources and are represented in the main daily living activities, such as with bone, wooden, and stone-tipped spears for hunting, and chipped-stone tools for butchering. Considering that paleoanthropologists and archeologists are focused on the study of different processes involved in the evolution of human behavior, investigating how hominins acted in the past through the study of evidence on archeological artifacts is crucial. Thus, investigating tool use is of major importance for a comprehensive understanding of all processes that characterize human choices of raw materials, techniques, and tool types. Many functional assumptions of tool use have been based on tool design and morphology according to archeologists’ interpretations and ethnographic observations. Such assumptions are used as baselines when inferring human behavior and have driven an improvement in the methods and techniques employed in functional studies over the past few decades. Here, while arguing that use-wear analysis is a key discipline to assess past hominin tool use and to interpret the organization and variability of artifact types in the archeological record, we aim to review and discuss the current state-of-the-art methods, protocols, and their limitations. In doing so, our discussion focuses on three main topics: (1) the need for fundamental improvements by adopting established methods and techniques from similar research fields, (2) the need to implement and combine different levels of experimentation, and (3) the crucial need to establish standards and protocols in order to improve data quality, standardization, repeatability, and reproducibility. By adopting this perspective, we believe that studies will increase the reliability and applicability of use-wear methods on tool function. The need for a holistic approach that combines not only use-wear traces but also tool technology, design, curation, durability, and efficiency is also debated and revised. Such a revision is a crucial step if archeologists want to build major inferences on human decision-making behavior and biocultural evolution processes.
Highlights
From the earliest manifestations of technology in modern societies, technologies have enabled humans to adapt, express, and communicate (Foley and Lahr 2003; Holdaway and Douglass 2012; Morgan et al 2015; Stout et al 2011)
In what concerns studies of past human technology, it can be argued that interpretations of past human behavior depend exclusively on evidence from the archeological record, and archeological disciplines such as use-wear studies seek those direct pieces of evidence (Shea 2011)
Our review shows that the nature of most of the limitations is no different from any other fields in archeological research, reflecting the trajectory and major methodological and theoretical debates in the history of archeological thought
Summary
From the earliest manifestations of technology in modern societies, technologies have enabled humans to adapt, express, and communicate (Foley and Lahr 2003; Holdaway and Douglass 2012; Morgan et al 2015; Stout et al 2011). Unlike techno-functional analysis, traceological studies always include experimental replication and reference collections as a proxy to identify and interpret the archeological evidence (Adams and Adams 2009) It is beyond the scope of this paper to offer a new set of methods and/or theoretical orientations, here, we aim to discuss this methodological and conceptual trajectory. In the early 1960’s, the emergence of New Archeology, with its emphasis on natural and cultural phenomena as major factors for complex human social behavior (Binford 1962; Longacre 2010), led to a new emphasis on traceological studies This phase was marked by testing the limitations pointed out by Semenov’s work (Semenov 1957, 1964), which mainly concerned the difficulties of identifying and interpreting the diversity of wear traces when exclusively using a stereomicroscope (Keeley 1974; Odell 1975).
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