Identifying episodes of recycling in the archaeological record

Abstract

According to a recent meme, there are two types of people in this world: 1) Those who can extrapolate from incomplete data. This is obviously flippant. Nonetheless, archaeology has no choice but to deal with incomplete data, and it could be argued that it became an academic discipline because of it. Archaeological science attempts to increase the amount of archaeological data. Analysing the chemical compositions of artefacts, for example, can provide information about objects that were invisible to the people who made them.More data, however, can lead to competition between data types. For example, A. Bernard Knapp (2012, 14-25) provides an illustrative example of a copper axe/adze (KM 457) and a piece of copper ore (KM 633) found at Kissonerga-Mosphilia (Late Chalcolithic/Pre-Bronze Age 1), a site which provided crucial data for the earliest stages of indigenous metalworking and casting activities in Cyprus. Lead isotopic analyses (LIA) conducted on the ore were consistent with Cypriot sources, but the copper axe was not (Gale 1991; Fig. 6.1). The axe's LIA signature does not overlap with Cypriot ores. It falls within hand-drawn and constructed ellipses but not within the kernel density estimates (KDE) that aim to represent Cyprus' LIA ore field; in fact, it lies closer to the ores of the Troad in northwest Anatolia (