Comparing Later Stone Age to Iron Age Quartz Lithic Technologies in Western Kenya

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Vein or “milky” quartz is one of the most common raw materials used in lithic production all over the world. It is also one of the most difficult to analyze, given its large crystal structures and propensity to produce angular shatter during reduction. Archaeological and experimental research on quartz lithic production has been critical in developing analytical strategies to address these problems. This research contributes to these debates in presenting an assessment of how well quartz assemblages produced by economically distinct Early Holocene foragers and Later Holocene agro-pastoralists at Kakapel Rockshelter, western Kenya can be typologically and metrically distinguished from one another. The study finds that major economic differences between these groups manifest clearly in tool typologies and core morphologies, but are not as evident in any aspects of flake debris. This suggests that quartz constrains operational sequences, possibly reducing our ability to detect meaningful variation in the archaeological record.