Use-wear studies were undertaken to determine if the Clovis bifaces discovered at the Gault site in Central Texas were utilized implements or rather products of lithic raw material procurement. Those bifaces bearing microscopic traces indicative of use were studied in detail to determine the use-history of the tools. This thesis describes an experimental program aimed to build analogues for probable biface functions. A series of projectile impact studies, butchering experiments, and expedient-like tool useactivities were conducted to document the traces acquired on the tool surface from use. The experimental results are used to identify the utilized tools, demonstrate their functional purpose, and suggest the extent of tool use of the prehistoric biface assemblage.

This study examines decision making concerning tool use and rawmaterial choice through the analysis of bone technology from five sites from the MiddleMissouri subarea of the Northern Plains of North America. The research methods employed include high power optical microwear analysis, experimental replication,and the study of modern bone tool use. At the time of contact with Europeans andEuroamericans, the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara lived in semi sedentary villages along the Missouri River where they practiced a mixed economy centered on both agriculture and bison hunting. The villagers were central in indigenous trade networks and later in the international fur trade, as European and Euroamericans traders and explorers sought to insert themselves into the existing networks. Occasional trade goods are found as early as the seventeenth century, increasing through time as more Europeans and Euroamericans entered the area, indicating that the villagers supplied the newcomers with food, horses, and furs in exchange for those goods. They also were impacted by European diseases, increasing violence, and by accompanying changes in many aspects of their society.Post contact technological change is often modeled as a relatively simple unilinear process in which metal tools quickly replaced older technologies. Analysis of modified bone and antler from historic sites indicates the processes were more complicated. Some tool types were quickly replaced, while others persisted, and there was also variation within tool types. Rather than immediately rendering bone technology obsolete, as has been suggested, there was an initial period of experimentation as people used the new metal cutting and chopping tools to modify the older bone technology. Some tools were made by simply shaping the bone with metal rather than stone, but in other cases the new metal tools were used to create bone tools in completely new forms. Both social and functional factors influence tool choices in raw material, form, and use. This study provides a deeper understanding of many processes involved in technological change in the contact period.

This thesis is a use-wear study that deals with microwear on stone endscrapers used on one worked material: animal skins. The first part of the study defines and describes the process of rendering freshly skinned pelts into functional leather or rawhide products, addressing confusing terminology found in the literature as well. Problems with past use-wear experiments dealing with animal skins are also confronted and explained. The second part of the study examines endscrapers used to flesh and dehair bison hides and compares the use-wear traces left on the tool edge by each activity. This suite of characteristics is then compared to those found on an assemblage of Clovis-age scrapers from the Gault site in central Texas.

Prehistoric quarries in America are poorly understood and thus problematical to take into account when making inferences about past behavior. A microwear analysis of Clovis blades from the 2000 Texas A&M University excavations at the Gault site (41BL323), located in southern Bell County, Texas, provided a window into this problem. Texas A&M excavations on the site produced an extraordinarily large number of Clovis artifacts in two bounded geologic units, 3a and 3b. Included in the artifact types are blades, specialized elongate flakes associated with a core and blade technology. In conducting a microwear analysis of the Clovis blades from Gault, I proposed the following questions: (1) were the Clovis blades utilized at Gault?; (2) is there a difference in the use-wear patterns of Clovis blades from the geological units 3a and 3b?; and (3) is Gault, as a quarry/workshop site, a place to just obtain raw materials or did it also serve as a craft site? Observations from experiments, stereomicroscope analysis, compound microscope analysis, and SEM/EDS analysis led to answers for two research questions: (1) blades were used at Gault and (2) there is a difference between Clovis units 3a and 3b. Eight Clovis 3a blades, or 3.0% of the total Clovis 3a blade/blade fragment population (n=264), exhibit use-wear. Six Clovis 3b blades, 3.3% of the total Clovis 3b blade/blade fragment population (n=182), exhibit use-wear. In general, Clovis 3b blades were used on harder contact materials (wood to bone) than those in Clovis Unit 3a (softer contact materials similar to grass, sinew, and rawhide). The function(s) of quarries and quarry-related workshops were interpreted by William Henry Holmes as a place to obtain raw materials, while Kirk Bryan interpreted them as a place to bring other materials to work in craft activities. Following the microwear analysis of Clovis blades/blade fragments at Gault, I compared Gault to three other Paleoindian quarry-workshop sites (Wells Creek, Dutchess Quarry, and West Athens Hill). My intent is to provide supplemental data for the consideration when applying Holmes’ and Bryan’s respective hypotheses.

This thesis is a use-wear study that deals with microwear on stone endscrapers used on one worked material: animal skins. The first part of the study defines and describes the process of rendering freshly skinned pelts into functional leather or rawhide products, addressing confusing terminology found in the literature as well. Problems with past use-wear experiments dealing with animal skins are also confronted and explained. The second part of the study examines endscrapers used to flesh and dehair bison hides and compares the use-wear traces left on the tool edge by each activity. This suite of characteristics is then compared to those found on an assemblage of Clovis-age scrapers from the Gault site in central Texas.

The Wickliffe Thick pottery type, an unusual vessel with a globular body, thick wall, and funnel-like opening at the bottom, has been assumed to be related to salt production and/or juice pressing. The following project presents the results of a use-wear analysis in order to understand Wickliffe Thick’s possible uses demonstrating that past conclusions likely need revision. A systematic, macroscopic analysis of ceramic sherds from more than 20 Mississippian sites throughout Kentucky, Missouri, and Illinois are included in the study. Use-wear on the samples occur in a low frequency. Although other factors such as a white efflorescence, and Wickliffe Thick’s temporal and spatial layout may hint at its usage in the nixtamalization process. This paper lays out the evidence for these hypotheses while also recording the characteristics of Wickliffe Thick across the southeastern United States.

The Casas Grandes Valley is located in the northwestern corner of the modern state of Chihuahua, Mexico. This area falls into the greater Northwest/Southwest cultural region. Research conducted on Casas Grandes ceramics up to this point has focused on form and design in connection with burials, authority, sociopolitical organization, ceremony and ritual, communication, and identifying cultural boundaries and influences. Very little has been said about some of the everyday uses of Casas Grandes ceramics. My thesis explores the evidences of use on ceramic vessels in the Casas Grandes region during the Medio period (AD 1200-1450). I conducted a use-alteration analysis on the interiors and exteriors of 300 vessels. The purpose of this study was to examine the question: how were the vessels used by the people of Casas Grandes? These analyses suggest that the vessels were typically used for separate but not altogether distinct use activities. All vessels had some evidences of wear, regardless of vessel form, size, or decoration. The general use patterns followed some intended functional categories, with enough variety to suggest vessels were also used according to individual needs.

This study evaluates how prehispanic central Mexicans made stone tools—primarily from obsidian—and used them in their homes over a period of 3,000 years. Mesoamerican scholars have often assumed the functional purposes of different lithic tools based on their material or technological attributes. Most limit their studies to single sites and extrapolate broader reconstructions of economic activities. I assess stone tool functions and associated economic activities through technological analyses of more than 43,000 lithic artifacts and, in addition, a feasibility study for high magnification use-wear analysis utilizing 589 of these artifacts from multiple household contexts in the central Mexican villages of Amomoloc (900-650 B.C.), Tetel (750-500 B.C.), and Mesitas (600-500 B.C.); the town of La Laguna (600 B.C.-A.D. 150); the city of Teotihuacan (A.D. 200-550); and the Aztec village of Cihuatecpan (A.D. 1150-1550). I determine that pressure blades—the most common tool form—were multifunctional. They were regularly modified via pressure trimming or notching and recycled through bipolar percussion to suit specific tasks. Blade production error rates decreased consistently, especially after the invention of core platform grinding near the end of the Classic period (A.D. 100-600). Preliminary results of the use-wear feasibility study suggest that certain tools became associated with specific tasks. Scrapers were mainly used to produce goods of maguey, wood, and hide. People came to use hafted atlatl dart points and bifacial knives almost exclusively for hunting and meat butchering tasks, respectively, and smaller bifacial drills mostly for shell craft production. Bipolar tools created through anvil percussion were more common during the Formative period (1500 B.C.-A.D. 100), when they were probably used as expedient kitchen utensils. Obsidian tools in central Mexico were not exclusively staple goods. Ritual bloodletting implements are spatially associated with communal altars and commoner and elite residences, but after the Epiclassic period (A.D. 600-900) bloodletting was restricted primarily to temples. Likewise, although weaponry was common during the Classic through Postclassic periods, and jewelry was relatively common during the Late Postclassic period (A.D. 1325-1521), in prehispanic times their spatial distributions were much more restricted across site contexts compared to obsidian staple goods. I demonstrate that in prehispanic central Mexico stone tools were produced and used primarily in household spaces, contrary to models that have emphasized sponsorship by elites or religious institutions. Residents produced stone tools in their homes primarily to satisfy their own needs during the Formative period. As rising populations contributed to urban densities and the development of marketplace economies, household lithic production increased to satisfy broader consumer demand. Producing households often specialized in blade production or followed a multicrafting strategy, in which the scale of production exceeded their own needs.

Early phases of Kolomoki’s occupation have been characterized as relatively egalitarian, with little evidence for status differentiation. However, patterned variability in lithic raw material use and intensity of production in domestic areas suggests heterogeneity in the community at multiple scales. In light of Kolomoki’s emphasis on communal ceremony, internal divisions between groups of households highlight the tension between public and private expressions of status and social solidarity. New radiocarbon dates from the southern margins of the village have allowed us to assess the contemporaneity of this pattern, and by extension, the chronology of village aggregation.

Handaxes are some of the longest lasting and most iconic stone tools throughout human evolution. Appearing in the early Pleistocene, these bifacially flaked tools persisted around one and a half million years and span across all of the Old World, from Africa to eastern Asia. Despite their ubiquitous nature, relatively little is known about their function. Handaxes are often speculated to be multi-functional tools which were selected for due to their large cutting edge; however, only a handful of use-wear studies have attempted to elucidate their use in the archaeological record. The lack of experimental use-wear studies surrounding handaxe function is due to preservation issues and the fact that manufacturing and curating handaxes compounds the ambiguity of microwear signatures. The methodology undertaken in this research provides a pathway to overcoming these obstacles through experimental archaeology in conjunction with low powered microscopy, image-based GIS, and statistical hypothesis testing. In particular, this thesis investigates handaxe function at an assemblage scale (n = 56) in a late Lower Paleolithic to Middle Paleolithic archaeological site called Shishan Marsh – 1 (SM-1) in al-Azraq, Jordan. Experimental handaxes (n = 22) were replicated and used in various activities such as butchery, plant processing, woodworking, shellfish processing, and digging. The results of this research corroborates the idea of handaxes being used as multifunctional tools. These results have implications for handaxe function, hominin tool use in a desert refugia, and provides a new pathway to investigate inter-site variability in handaxe use. / Graduate / 2018-08-01