Artifacts as landscapes: A use-wear case study of upper paleolithic assemblages at the solutré kill site, France

Abstract

The concepts of landscape and scale vary considerably during archaeological analysis. Landscape typically invokes ideas of site distribution studies and analyses of site function variability across localities, regions, or continents. Rarely, though, is the landscape concept consciously applied to the analysis of individual artifacts. When looking at human activity patterning across a landscape, it is important to understand what took place at individual sites, i.e., site function. One prominent and important source of information is the stone tool assemblage, especially at sites where little else is preserved. Researchers often infer the different activities from formal tool types: hunting from projectile points or armatures, butchery and other processing from scrapers, and work with hard contact materials, such as bone or antler, from burins. In addition, they use the frequencies of formal types in an assemblage or archaeological component to estimate the relative importance of such activities. As tools can serve a variety of purposes, however, inferences of site function based on the morphology and composition of a lithic tool assemblage are insufficient. Only high-power use-wear methodologies can reveal the nature and extent of individual tool use and, hence, the pattern of activity at a site. At issue here is the need to understand a toolkit's structure and flexibility in order to make the analytical leap to the recognition of secondary site activities and temporal variability between components. Schlanger (1990:20) points out that the real existence of a tool is when it is in action or animated by gestures. A tool loses its technological meaning as soon as it moves from its behavioral context. Use-wear analysis allows one to witness a tool in action and the gestures of its user indirectly, through the use-wear signatures visible within the landscape of the tool at a microscopic scale, and then project this behavior within the context of site activities at a human scale. Lithic analyses focused on metrics and reduction sequence attributes provide only a partial description of the productive sequence. The landscape concept may seem inappropriate for use-wear analysis, but it emphasizes that the study of human behavior is not confined to the scale of the lived-in environment that we perceive. The locations of wear traces indicate which specific portions of a tool were in contact with a worked material, as well as which portions of a tool were contained within a haft element or held in the user's hand, and the patterning of the recognized wear features across the landscape of the artifact suggest tool use and tool function. Use-wear analysis therefore allows researchers to understand the nuances of tool use and human behavior at specific places and, after this process is complete, enables them to consider the evidence at increasingly larger scales, moving from site function to an understanding of the scope and complexity of human activity across a larger landscape. This chapter summarizes the results of a high-resolution use-wear analysis of lithic artifacts from the cultural components at the Upper Paleolithic kill site of Solutré (Saon̂e-et-Loire), France (Banks, 2004). The analysis employed a binocular differential-interference microscope with polarized reflected-light and Nomarski optics (Hoffman and Gross, 1970) at intermediate range magnifications (100-400) for use-wear determination and various statistical methods for interpretation. I will show that this use-wear analysis is an effective and necessary first step in understanding human activity in east-central France during the Upper Paleolithic, accomplished by building upon a multi-scalar foundation that begins with the treatment of individual artifacts as landscapes. © 2006 Springer Science+Business Media, LLC.