Announcement

Collapse
No announcement yet.

Archeology: Stone Age Site Challenges Assumptions About Early Techno

Collapse
X
 
  • Filter
  • Time
  • Show
Clear All
new posts

  • Archeology: Stone Age Site Challenges Assumptions About Early Techno

    STONE AGE SITE CHALLENGES ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT EARLY TECHNOLOGY

    UConn Today , CT
    Sept 26 2014

    by Tim Miller

    Analysis of artifacts from a newly excavated site in Armenia shows
    that human technological innovation occurred intermittently throughout
    the Old World, rather than spreading from a single point of origin,
    as previously thought.

    The study, co-authored by UConn archaeology professor Daniel Adler
    and more than a dozen scientists from universities worldwide, was
    recently published in the journal Science. Adler and his colleagues
    examined thousands of stone artifacts retrieved from Nor Geghi 1, a
    site on the outskirts of Yerevan, the Armenian capital. The artifacts
    were found in sediments between two ancient layers of lava that could
    be accurately dated to a period between 325,000 and 350,000 years ago.

    The collection comprises stone tools made using two distinct
    technologies, an older method called bifacial technology, and a
    more advanced method known as Levallois technology. Archaeologists
    previously believed that Levallois technology was invented in Africa
    and spread to Eurasia with expanding human populations, replacing
    local biface technologies. The co-existence of the two technologies at
    Nor Geghi 1 provides the first clear evidence that local populations
    developed Levallois technology on their own.

    "The combination of these different technologies in one place
    suggests to us that, about 325,000 years ago, people at the site were
    innovative," says Adler. Moreover, the chemical analysis of several
    hundred obsidian artifacts shows that humans at the site utilized
    obsidian outcrops from as far away as 75 miles, suggesting they must
    also have been capable of exploiting large, environmentally diverse
    territories.

    The paper argues that biface and Levallois technology, while distinct
    in many regards, share a common pedigree. In biface technology, a mass
    of stone is shaped through the removal of flakes from two surfaces
    in order to produce a tool such as a hand axe. The flakes detached
    during the manufacture of a biface are treated as waste. In Levallois
    technology, a mass of stone is shaped through the removal of flakes in
    order to produce a convex surface from which flakes of predetermined
    size and shape are detached. The predetermined flakes produced through
    Levallois technology are the desired products. Archaeologists suggest
    that Levallois technology is optimal in terms of raw material use and
    that the predetermined flakes are relatively small and easy to carry.

    These were important issues for the highly mobile hunter-gatherers
    of the time.

    It is the novel combination of the shaping and flaking systems that
    distinguishes Levallois from other technologies, and highlights its
    evolutionary relationship to biface technology. Based on comparisons
    of archaeological data from sites in Africa, the Middle East, and
    Europe, the study also demonstrates that this evolution was gradual
    and intermittent, and that it occurred independently within different
    human populations who shared a common technological ancestry, says
    Adler. In other words Levallois technology evolved out of pre-existing
    biface technology in different places at different times.

    This conclusion challenges the view held by some archaeologists
    that technological change resulted from population expansion during
    this period.

    "If I were to take all the artifacts from the site and show them to
    an archaeologist, they would immediately begin to categorize them
    into chronologically distinct groups," Adler says. The artifacts
    found at Nor Geghi 1, however, reflect the technological flexibility
    and variability of a single population during a period of profound
    human behavioral and biological change. These results highlight the
    antiquity of the human capacity for innovation.

    The excavation at Nor Geghi 1, just outside the Armenian capital of
    Yerevan, was performed with the help of a number of UConn students,
    including undergraduates taking part in UConn's Education Abroad
    Field School program.

    Major support for the work came from UConn's Norian Armenian Programs
    Committee, which was established in 2004 to enhance the longstanding
    collaboration between UConn and Armenia's Yerevan State University.

    "The successes of the archaeological field school underscore the
    importance of high-quality science collaborations with our strategic
    global partners," says Daniel Weiner, vice provost for global affairs,
    who co-chairs the committee.

    Additional funding came from the U.K. Natural Environment Research
    Council; the L.S.B. Leakey Foundation; the Irish Research Council;
    and the University of Winchester, U.K.

    http://today.uconn.edu/blog/2014/09/stone-age-site-challenges-assumptions-about-early-technology/

Working...
X