The three lives of a uniface

Abstract

Three different sorts of unifacial stone tool allometric patterns – representing three different sorts of flake design and exploitation patterns – are used to consider the role landscape familiarity plays in producing variability in hunter–gatherer lithic technologies. It had been previously hypothesized that colonizers' unifacial tools (on the population level) should possess the design property of longevity because as people travel in unfamiliar landscapes they could not be certain of encountering new stone outcrops to replenish their stock. Previous analyses of Clovis unifacial tools were consistent with this hypothesis and showed the first allometric pattern, namely that larger tools possessed flatter, less spherical shapes than the smaller tools, suggesting Clovis foragers exploited the retouch potential afforded by the larger, flatter blanks. Here, we hypothesized that the design property of longevity in unifacial tools would be less important to non-colonizing post-Clovis foragers because they would have been more familiar with environments and stone outcrop locations, and thus better able to tailor their unifacial tools to habitat-specific functional and scheduling requirements. Operationally, this lack of concern with tool longevity would be demonstrated by a second or third allometric pattern, namely that there is no relationship between tool size and shape, or that larger tools are rounder than smaller tools. We tested this prediction with analyses of 435 unifacial stone tools from several post-Clovis groups in vastly different environments, including Parkhill (Great Lakes), Folsom (Rocky Mountains), and Cody/Alberta (High Plains). Regardless of whether the post-Clovis dataset was examined in its entirety or by individual cultures, no iteration of the analyses exhibited an allometric pattern similar to the Clovis one. Overall, these results suggest that landscape familiarity plays a significant role in hunter–gatherer unifacial stone tool technological organization.