Hafted bifaces known as ‘Big Sandys’ are side-notched lithic tools that are present in Early and Late Archaic contexts, limiting their utility as temporally diagnostic artifacts. I used Cultural Transmission theory to derive an initial expectation that there should be discernable variation due to the incongruous presence of Big Sandys throughout the Archaic and the millennia of time separating the production of these artifacts. I used Geometric Morphometrics to detect potential differences between the haft elements of Early and Late Archaic side-notched points. Statistical analysis of the morphometric data revealed there are differences in the morphology of the haft element between Early and Late Archaic varieties. However, larger sample sizes are necessary to reliably classify a Big Sandy biface from unknown context as belonging to either the Early or Late varieties using morphometrics.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:MSSTATE/oai:scholarsjunction.msstate.edu:td-5273 |
| Date | 01 May 2020 |
| Creators | Joseph, William |
| Publisher | Scholars Junction |
| Source Sets | Mississippi State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Source | Theses and Dissertations |
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