The use of microwear analysis has made substantial contributions to the study of archaeological bodily ornaments. However, limitations persist with regard to the interpretation of use and the reconstruction of systems of attachment, hampering a holistic understanding of the diversity of past bodily adornment. This is because the complexities of ornament biographies and the resulting wear traces cannot be grasped exclusively from the study of experimental reference collections. In this paper, we propose to bridge this gap in interpretation by systematically researching ethnographic collections. We conducted a microscopic study of 38 composite ornaments from lowland South America housed at the Musée du quai Branly (Paris). These objects involve organic, biomineral, and inorganic components, attached through different string configurations. The combined use of optical and 3D digital microscopy at different magnification ranges provided a thorough understanding of wear trace formation, distribution, and characterization. We demonstrate how individual beads develop characteristic use-wear in relation to one another and to the strings. We further challenge common assumptions made in the analysis of archaeological ornaments. In sum, this research addresses methodological and interpretative issues in the study of bodily adornment at large, by providing insight into the biographies of objects that were actually worn in a lived context. In the future, our results can be applied as reference for a more effective understanding of the use of ornaments worldwide.
This paper examines aspects of the agricultural activities and network supported by ‘Canaanean’ blade segments from Ninevite V sites located principally in Syria and Iraq. Technological and functional analyses of an extensive sample of these tools, alongside experimental and ethnoarchaeological reference data, point to their use as instruments for working cereals, but not a harvesting tool (sickle) as is usually assumed. Our analyses indicate that these blades were standardised inserts used in a special raft-like threshing sledge as described in contemporary cuneiform texts. The functional study was enlarged to include an extensive experimental program that studied harvesting and other agricultural tools. In particular, we analysed all effects of the functioning of reconstructed threshing rafts, armed with reproductions of Canaanean blade segments. Microscopic silica phytolith ‘sheets’ from cereal stems, extracted from soil samples taken from structures in various sites, indicated that straw chopped with the instrument was used in large quantities as mudbrick temper, fuel and animal fodder. Experimental studies carried out on blades to examine indicators of the knapping method revealed traces of a special manufacturing technique—pressure debitage with a lever and a copper-tipped point, which was identified on standardised Canaanean blades in the northern Mesopotamian sites studied. Our findings suggest that these Canaanean blade segments were produced in northern Mesopotamian workshops and then distributed over the region to equip threshing sledges. This lends support to hypotheses that local centres controlled extensive networks of village sites in the Ninevite V period, and were devoted to the large-scale production, storage and redistribution of agricultural products, possibly in exchange for items such as the specially produced threshing sledge blades.
China is a major centre for rice domestication, where starch grain analysis has been widely applied to archaeological grinding tools to gain information about plant use by ancient Chinese societies. However, few rice starch grains have been identified to date. To understand this apparent scarcity of starch grains from rice, dry‐ and wet‐grinding experiments with stone tools were carried out on four types of cereals: rice (Oryza sativa L.), foxtail millet (Setaria italica), Job's tears (Coix lacryma‐jobi L.) and barley (Hordeum vulgare L.). The results reveal that dry‐grinding produces significant damage to starches to the point where they may be undetected in archaeological samples, while wet‐grinding causes only slight morphological changes to the starch grains. Moreover, rice starch grains have the most substantial alterations from dry‐grinding, possibly impeding their identification. These findings provide a possible means to explain the relative scarcity of rice starch grains recovered from archaeological grinding tools, which it is suggested was caused by the use of the dry‐grinding technique. Therefore, it is suggested that rice starch grains have been likely underrepresented in the archaeological record, and previous interpretations of starch analyses need to be reconsidered.
The retouching and resharpening of lithic tools during their production and maintenance leads to the production of large numbers of small flakes and chips known as microdebitage. Standard analytical approaches to this material involves the mapping of microartefact densities to identify activity areas, and the creation of techno-typologies to characterise the form of retouch flakes from different types of tools. Whilst use-wear analysis is a common approach to the analysis of tools, it has been applied much less commonly to microdebitage. This paper contends that the use-wear analysis of microdebitage holds great potential for identifying activity areas on archaeological sites, representing a relatively unexplored analytical resource within microartefact assemblages. In order to test the range of factors that affect the identification of use-wear traces on small retouch flakes, a blind test consisting of 40 retouch flakes was conducted. The results show that wear traces can be identified with comparable levels of accuracy to those reported for historic blind tests of standard lithic tools suggesting that the use-wear analysis of retouch flakes can be a useful analytical tool in understanding site function, and in increasing sample sizes in cases where assemblages contain few tools.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.