Flint knapping at the end of an era : final palaeolithic and early mesolithic technological traditions in northwestern Belgium

Our current knowledge on the Lateglacial and Early Holocene technological traditions in Northwestern Belgium relies primarily on quantitative data (attribute analysis) gathered in the past two decades on the Lower Scheldt valley sites of Verrebroek and Doel. This allowed us to forge a first idea of the range of knapping methods and techniques applied during this transitional period and at the same time to link the observed technological schemes to the known typological variability in this region. As part of an ongoing PhD research, the recently excavated Upper Scheldt valley sites of Ruien (Fi... Mehr ...

Verfasser: Vandendriessche, Hans
Crombé, Philippe
Dokumenttyp: conference
Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
Verlag/Hrsg.: European Association of Archaeologists
Schlagwörter: History and Archaeology / Final-Palaeolithic / Early-Mesolithic / Lithic technology / Refitting / Attribute analysis
Sprache: Englisch
Permalink: https://search.fid-benelux.de/Record/base-28551775
Datenquelle: BASE; Originalkatalog
Powered By: BASE
Link(s) : https://biblio.ugent.be/publication/8686344

Our current knowledge on the Lateglacial and Early Holocene technological traditions in Northwestern Belgium relies primarily on quantitative data (attribute analysis) gathered in the past two decades on the Lower Scheldt valley sites of Verrebroek and Doel. This allowed us to forge a first idea of the range of knapping methods and techniques applied during this transitional period and at the same time to link the observed technological schemes to the known typological variability in this region. As part of an ongoing PhD research, the recently excavated Upper Scheldt valley sites of Ruien (Final-Palaeolithic) and Kerkhove (Early-Mesolithic) are added to this equation, in order to assess and expand the still rather limited knowledge on the matter. However within the current research, a twofold methodology is adopted: in addition to a detailed attribute analysis, the abovementioned sites are also subjected to a refit study, thus providing us with both quantitative aggregate level data (at the scale of an artefact cluster) and data at the level of a single refit sequence. Although preliminary results indicate that technological traditions at the start of the Younger Dryas do not differ substantially from those of the Early Holocene, the first refitted sequences from Kerkhove already seem to depict a much greater variability in the knapping methods adopted by the hunter-gatherers at the site, than is generally acknowledged for this period.