Recommendation of: The role of heritage databases in typological reification: a case study from the Final Palaeolithic of southern Scandinavia. Round#2

Large tanged points are cherished cultural index fossil artefacts in European prehistory. In different research traditions and different regions, they are known by different labels – Lyngby points, Bromme points, and Teyjat points, for instance – and they are mobilised in interpretations of culture-historical processes such as migration, territoriality, contact and even ethnic identity. Yet, some studies, including recent ones employing computational methods, highlight that (i) the size and weight of such points are suggestive of their use as dart-tips rather than arrowheads, and (ii) they are so variable that regional or chronological groups are difficult to demarcate clearly. Together these studies imply that typological schemes that seek to identify culturally and chronologically meaningful large tanged point variants fail, questioning their efficacy as culture-historical marker artefact. In this chapter, I review the research historical roots of the notion of large tanged points as cultural index fossils and discuss the implications of recent analyses. In particular and with a focus on Denmark, I intersect the research history of Final Palaeolithic archaeology in the region with the development of typological thinking and the phasing-in of a national digital heritage database. In doing so, I show how notions of overly normative types had been transferred from the Metal Ages to the Palaeolithic and how database structure subsequently reified a particular view of large tanged points as salient marker artefact. As a result, there is arguably an increasing rift between the epistemic status of Final Palaeolithic large tanged points and the way in which the bulk of these objects are registered in the national database. If true, this has important implication for how this period is understood but also for the ideal design principles of heritage databases whose ambition it is to avoid typological reification by integrating registration practice with the results of ongoing research.