Dr. Mark F. Seeman of Kent State University and with the support of the National Science Foundation will conduct an archaeological investigation of the relationships that link tool design and tool use within early Paleoindian societies. The specific focus will be on the stone tool assemblage from the Nobles Pond site (33ST357), Stark Co., Ohio. Nobles Pond pertains to the Gainey phase of the Midwest and is one of the largest Early Paleoindian sites in eastern North America ca. 11,200-10,800 B.P. Gainey phase Paleoindians were the earliest known human populations in the lower Great Lakes area. They were resilient, "high-technology foragers" in that they employed portable, but complexly designed tools with long use-lives and with strong potentialities for salvage and recycling. They also were among the most mobile populations on earth. To the extent that the Paleoindians that occupied Nobles Pond lie at one extreme of the residential strategies characterizing human groups, they provide a useful context for studying technological organization. Here the design/utility relationship of the toolkit should be under conditions of intense selection as colonizing foragers occupy new and dynamic landscapes. In order to investigate this question in controlled fashion, the focus will be on formal unifacial tools, specifically hafted end scrapers.
The Nobles Pond excavation has yielded over 1,800 hafted end scrapers, the largest known Paleoindian site sample. In this study, representative tools will be selected from two different kinds of site contexts and will be compared with modern facsimiles used under experimental conditions, combining insights of both the archaeologist and the physicist. The study addresses three main questions. 1) How much of the formal variation in observable morphology can be explained by the use, breakage, depletion, recycling, and salvage of a single class of designed tools? 2) How well do particular patterns of wear on Nobles Pond tools correlate with particular states of depletion or other use-life conditions? 3) How well do particular patterns of wear correlate with depletion or other use-life conditions on similar, but experimentally produced and utilized tools?
The broad-scale advantages to this study lie in the ability to bring the results of analyses of form, wear, and experimentation together in a single research program applied to a large sample. The targeted design/use relationship is important to archaeology and is a key question in the examination of all technological systems, ultimately bearing on such larger constructs as adaptive optimization, depth of planning, and risk minimization. It also should be recognized that the Nobles Pond excavation was a community effort, with over 2,000 adult volunteers participating in the excavation. This analytical project will allow the continuation of a regional connection to what has become an important archaeological touchstone through the continued involvement of local volunteers in a scientific laboratory program at a university in their own community. This project further marks the first collaboration between archaeology and physics at Kent State University, and it is one that can be built on to investigate the process of wear at multiple scales in the future. Hafted end scrapers are the most numerous formal tools in Early Paleoindian contexts, and their study can provide strong insights into the survival strategies of the many foraging societies that occupied the majority of our collective past.
Early Paleoindian societies were mobile, high-technology foragers ca. 11,000 B.P. situated at one extreme of a continuum of strategies linking mobility and tool design. The archaeological remains of these early people thus provide a useful context for disentangling the conceptual links between design and depletion, design and use, and design and multifunctionality. Nobles Pond (33St357), a large Paleoindian site in northeastern Ohio, was the target of our study. One-hundred and fifty-seven complete end scrapers—hafted unifacial tools designed for extensive resharpening and long use-lives—were analyzed. Wilmsen’s (1970) hypothesis that there were steeper working angles on end scrapers in eastern North America when compared to those at western sites, and that this represented a change in function from hide-working to wood- and bone-working, was the basic organizing concept of the project. We used multiple lines of evidence such as morphometric analysis, high resolution microwear analysis, and the experimental hide-processing of ten deer and caribou in order to examine aspects of the design/use/depletion relationship(s). The most useful finding of our work was that one-third of the tools in the study were discarded with considerable remaining utility; they were not highly depleted following from predictions based on their over-built design and potential for long use-life. These conclusions were supported by the results of both morphometric analysis and experimentation (Figures 1-5). The latter indicated that many replica end scrapers had a utility and resharpening capability that extended beyond that necessary to process a single deer or caribou. Air temperature differences ranging from 70 degrees to minus ten degrees Fahrenheit made no difference in the workability of hides under controlled conditions. We concluded that the high frequencies of discarded "underutilized" tools at Nobles Pond and other regional Paleoindian sites can be explained by the efficiency gained by retooling at the start of a new job (hide). These results force a change in interpretive perspective away from one of lithic conservation and toward one of time-efficiency. In terms of the organization of Paleoindian technology, there is a balance between traditional tool design and situational contingency. The microwear component of this study shows conclusively that end scraper use at Nobles Pond was strongly patterned and focused on the wet-scraping of fresh hides (Fig. 6). These results support our multivariate morphometic results and go against Wilmsen's interpretation of a predominate bone- and wood-working function for Paleoindian end scrapers in eastern North America. Variation in distal edge working angle, a key variable in previous studies, was shown to be relatively unimportant when an expanded variable set was considered. Tool producers have more control over working bit characteristics than has been assumed previously, results that provide an empirical base for the further study of skill, performance, and assemblage composition. Contrary to Wilmsen, our results suggested that east-west differences in this important tool class were not so much a change in function, but rather, an intensification of hide-working itself in the east. We concluded that this difference is simply a demonstration of forager flexibility in hunting and provisioning that was tuned to particular resource sets, for example caribou versus bison, at the end of the Pleistocene. This project represented the first collaboration among the departments of anthropology, biological sciences, and physics at Kent State University. Fifteen graduate and undergraduate students were trained in archaeological laboratory techniques. Two undergraduates and one graduate student were employed by the project, which has resulted in two M.A. theses, one article, one book chapter, two abstracts and a symposium at the Society for Archaeology annual meeting in 2012. Additional publications are in progress.
