Not everyone bought into the Bronze Age right away, and Rosen describes and classifies the stone tools that continued to be made and used in the Middle East for the next two thousand years. He considers subtypes, function, distribution, chronology, the organization of production, styles, the relationship between lithic and metal technology, and other aspects. Over 100 drawings and maps provide archaeologists with a guide to identifying finds. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Written in Stone: The Multiple Dimensions of Lithic Analysis demonstrates the vitality of contemporary lithics analysis by examining material from a variety of geographical locations. This edited collection is primarily concerned with the link between craft production and social complexity, the nature of trade, and the delineation of settlement patterns and manipulation of landscape. While deconstructing the present to reconstruct the past, each chapter incorporates a technological dimension shaped by the type of analysis utilized. Methods include microwear analysis, which adds significant understanding of stone tool function, to the identification of obsidian sources, which illustrates the potential of lithic provenance studies for reconstructing trade. This book verifies and expands on the notion that lithics play an integral role in our understanding of past societies at all levels of complexity, from Paleolithic hunter-gatherers to archaic states.

This book surveys the archaeological record for stone tools from the earliest times to 6,500 years ago in the Near East.

A detailed overview of the Eastern African stone tools that make up the world's longest archaeological record.

Lithic Materials and Paleolithic Societies provides a detailed examination of the Paleolithic procurement and utilization of the most durable material in the worldwide archaeological record. The volume addresses sites ranging in age from some of the earliest hominin occupations in eastern and southern Africa to late Pleistocene and post-Pleistocene occupations in North American and Australia. The Early Paleolithic in India and the Near East, the Middle Paleolithic in Europe, and the Late Paleolithic in Europe and eastern Asia are also considered. The authors include established researchers who provide important synthetic statements updated with new information. Recent data are reported, often by younger scholars who are becoming respected members of the international research community. The authors represent research traditions from nine countries and therefore provide insight into the scholarly present as well as the Paleolithic past. Attempts are frequently made to relate lithic procurement and utilization to the organization of societies and even broader concerns of hominin behaviour. The volume re-evaluates existing interpretations in some instances by updating previous work of the authors and offers provocative new interpretations that at times call into question some basic assumptions of the Paleolithic. This book will be invaluable reading for advanced students and researchers in the fields of palaeolithic archaeology, geoarchaeology, and anthropology.

This volume offers a system for the hierarchical classification of British lithic artefacts from the Late Glacial and Holocene periods, and it is hoped that it may find use as a guide book for, for example, archaeology students, museum staff, non-specialist archaeologists, local archaeology groups and lay enthusiasts.

This volume examines the large flint knife blade asking why these artefacts were so common in the late Bronze Age of southern Scandinavia, a time which is supposed to be characterised by the transition from bronze to iron technology.

With a little perseverance anyone can learn how to make lithic artefact drawings. This book is a concise how-to guide.

Lithic analysts have been criticized for being atheoretical in their approach, or at least for not contributing to building archaeological theory. This volume redresses that balance. In Stone Tools, renowned lithic analysts employ explicitly theoretical constructs to explore the archaeological record and use the lithic database to establish its points. Chapters discuss curation, design theory, replacement of stone with metal, piece refitting, and projectile point style.

Although Neandertals lived in Europe and western Asia for more than 200,000 years, we know surprisingly little about them or about their everyday lives. Evidence of their behavior is largely derived from the surviving pieces of chipped stone and animal bone that resulted from their activities. One of the largest concentrations of stone and bone artifacts left by Neandertals was at the famous archaeological site of La Quina in southwestern France. This study of the significance of changes through time revealed by an analysis of the chipped stone at La Quina reports on the excavations of the Cooperative American–French Excavation Project from 1985 to 1994. It moves beyond the largely descriptive and subjective approaches that have traditionally been applied to this kind of evidence and applies several important quantitative analytical techniques. These new approaches incorporate the history of previous excavations at the site, the results of the work of the Cooperative Project, and the most recent scientific understanding of relevant climatic changes. This is a major contribution to our understanding of Neandertal behavior and industry. It adds new dimensions and perspectives based on innovative techniques of analysis. The analytic methods applied to lithic artifacts that form the heart of the book are the product of considerations about how to best interpret a sequence of multiple contextual samples. The author concludes the book with an extraordinarily useful chapter that places his findings into the larger context of our contemporary knowledge of Neandertal life in the region. The book comes with a compact disc, which includes coded observations used in the analysis in as many as 47 data fields for the more than 11,500 artifacts that will allow professionals and students to further explore the collection of lithic artifacts.