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Blade (archaeology)
In archaeology, a blade is a type of stone tool created by striking a long narrow flake from a stone core. This process of reducing the stone and producing the blades is called lithic reduction. Archaeologists use this process of flintknapping to analyze blades and observe their technological uses for historical purposes. Blades are defined as being flakes that are at least twice as long as they are wide and that have parallel or subparallel sides and at least two ridges on the dorsal (outer) side. Blade cores appear and are different from regular flaking cores, as each core's conchoidal nature is suited for different types of flaking. Blades are created using stones that have a cryptocrystalline structure and easily be fractured into a smooth piece without fracturing. Blades became the favored technology of the Upper Palaeolithic era, although they are occasionally found in earlier periods. Different techniques are also required for blade creation; a soft punch or hammerstone is ...
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Lame213
Lame or LAME may refer to: Music * "Lame" (song) by Unwritten Law * ''Lame'' (album) by Iame People * Ibrahim Lame (born 1953), Nigerian educator and politician * Jennifer Lame (), American film editor * Quintín Lame (1880–1967), Colombian rebel * Lame Kodra, pen name of Sejfulla Malëshova (1900–1971), Albanian politician and writer Technology * LAME, audio encoding computer software * Lame (armor), a single plate of a suit of armour * Lame (kitchen tool), a blade for scoring bread loaves * Licensed Aircraft Maintenance Engineer (''LAME'' or ''L-AME''), professional title and qualification Other uses * A limp or lameness, a leg impairment ** Lameness (equine) in horses **Any physical disability (by extension) * Lame language, a Nigerian, Bantoid dialect cluster See also * Lamé (other) * List of people known as the Lame * Lago delle Lame, a lake in Liguria, Italy * Lamer, hacker slang term * Lamestream media In journalism, mainstream media (MSM) is a te ...
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Scraper (archaeology)
In prehistoric archaeology, scrapers are unifacial tools thought to have been used for hideworking and woodworking. Many lithic analysts maintain that the only true scrapers are defined on the base of use-wear, and usually are those that were worked on the distal ends of blades—i.e., "end scrapers" (french: grattoir, link=no). Other scrapers include the so-called "side scrapers" or racloirs, which are made on the longest side of a flake, and notched scrapers, which have a cleft on either side that may have been used to attach them to something else. Scrapers are typically formed by chipping the end of a flake of stone in order to create one sharp side and to keep the rest of the sides dull to facilitate grasping it. Most scrapers are either circle or blade-like in shape. The working edges of scrapers tend to be convex, and many have trimmed and dulled lateral edges to facilitate hafting. One important variety of scraper is the thumbnail scraper, a scraper shaped much like ...
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Lithic Technology
In archaeology, lithic technology includes a broad array of techniques used to produce usable tools from various types of stone. The earliest stone tools were recovered from modern Ethiopia and were dated to between two-million and three-million years old. The archaeological record of lithic technology is divided into three major time periods: the Paleolithic (Old Stone Age), Mesolithic (Middle Stone Age), and Neolithic (New Stone Age). Not all cultures in all parts of the world exhibit the same pattern of lithic technological development, and stone tool technology continues to be used to this day, but these three time periods represent the span of the archaeological record when lithic technology was paramount. By analysing modern stone tool usage within an ethnoarchaeological context, insight into the breadth of factors influencing lithic technologies in general may be studied. See: Stone tool. For example, for the Gamo of Southern Ethiopia, political, environmental, and social fa ...
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Prismatic Blade
In archaeology, a prismatic blade is a long, narrow, specialized stone flake tool with a sharp edge, like a small razor blade. Prismatic blades are flaked from stone cores through pressure flaking or direct percussion. This process results in a very standardized finished tool and waste assemblage. The most famous and most prevalent prismatic blade material is obsidian, as obsidian use was widespread in Mesoamerica, though chert, flint, and chalcedony blades are not uncommon. The term is generally restricted to Mesoamerican archaeology, although some examples are found in the Old World, for example in a Minoan grave in Crete. Prismatic blades were used for cutting and scraping, and have been reshaped into other tool types, such as projectile points and awls. Morphology Prismatic blades are often trapezoidal in cross section, but very close in appearance to an isosceles trapezoid. Triangular blades (in cross-section) are also common. The ventral surface of the prismatic bla ...
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Obsidian
Obsidian () is a naturally occurring volcanic glass formed when lava extrusive rock, extruded from a volcano cools rapidly with minimal crystal growth. It is an igneous rock. Obsidian is produced from felsic lava, rich in the lighter elements such as silicon, oxygen, aluminium, sodium, and potassium. It is commonly found within the margins of rhyolite, rhyolitic lava flows known as obsidian flows. These flows have a high content of silicon dioxide, silica, granting them a high viscosity. The high viscosity inhibits atomic diffusion, diffusion of atoms through the lava, which inhibits the first step (nucleation) in the formation of mineral crystals. Together with rapid cooling, this results in a natural glass forming from the lava. Obsidian is hard, Brittleness, brittle, and amorphous; it therefore Fracture (mineralogy)#Conchoidal fracture, fractures with sharp edges. In the past, it was used to manufacture cutting and piercing tools, and it has been used experimentally as surgic ...
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Chert
Chert () is a hard, fine-grained sedimentary rock composed of microcrystalline or cryptocrystalline quartz, the mineral form of silicon dioxide (SiO2). Chert is characteristically of biological origin, but may also occur inorganically as a precipitation (chemistry), chemical precipitate or a diagenesis, diagenetic replacement, as in petrified wood. Chert is typically composed of the petrified remains of siliceous ooze, the biogenic sediment that covers large areas of the deep ocean floor, and which contains the silicon skeletal remains of diatoms, Dictyochales, silicoflagellates, and radiolarians. Precambrian cherts are notable for the presence of fossil cyanobacteria. In addition to Micropaleontology, microfossils, chert occasionally contains macrofossils. However, some chert is devoid of any fossils. Chert varies greatly in color (from white to black), but most often manifests as gray, brown, grayish brown and light green to rusty redW.L. Roberts, T.J. Campbell, G.R. Rapp Jr. ...
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Chopper (archaeology)
Archaeologists define a chopper as a pebble tool with an irregular cutting edge formed through the removal of flakes from one side of a stone. Choppers are crude forms of stone tool and are found in industries as early as the Lower Palaeolithic from around 2.5 million years ago. These earliest known specimens were found in the Olduvai Gorge in Tanzania by Louis Leakey in the 1930s. The name Oldowan was given to the tools after the site in which they were excavated. These types of tools were used an estimated time range of 2.5 to 1.2 million years ago. Formation To create this tool, one would have to use a hammerstone to chip away flakes on the stone to create a side of the stone with a very sharp edge, allowing for the cutting and hacking of an object. This is a unique type of lithic reduction, as only a single side of the stone is retouched to produce the cutting surface of the stone. The side that does not do the cutting is left unscathed, an unusual practice. These old ins ...
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Chalcolithic
The Copper Age, also called the Chalcolithic (; from grc-gre, χαλκός ''khalkós'', "copper" and  ''líthos'', "stone") or (A)eneolithic (from Latin '' aeneus'' "of copper"), is an archaeological period characterized by regular human manipulation of copper, but prior to the discovery of bronze alloys. Modern researchers consider the period as a subset of the broader Neolithic, but earlier scholars defined it as a transitional period between the Neolithic and the Bronze Age. The archaeological site of Belovode, on Rudnik mountain in Serbia, has the world's oldest securely dated evidence of copper smelting at high temperature, from (7000  BP). The transition from Copper Age to Bronze Age in Europe occurred between the late 5th and the late In the Ancient Near East the Copper Age covered about the same period, beginning in the late and lasting for about a millennium before it gave rise to the Early Bronze Age. Terminology The multiple names result from m ...
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Mesolithic
The Mesolithic (Greek: μέσος, ''mesos'' 'middle' + λίθος, ''lithos'' 'stone') or Middle Stone Age is the Old World archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic is often used synonymously, especially for outside northern Europe, and for the corresponding period in the Levant and Caucasus. The Mesolithic has different time spans in different parts of Eurasia. It refers to the final period of hunter-gatherer cultures in Europe and Western Asia, between the end of the Last Glacial Maximum and the Neolithic Revolution. In Europe it spans roughly 15,000 to 5,000  BP; in Southwest Asia (the Epipalaeolithic Near East) roughly 20,000 to 10,000  BP. The term is less used of areas farther east, and not at all beyond Eurasia and North Africa. The type of culture associated with the Mesolithic varies between areas, but it is associated with a decline in the group hunting of large animals in favour of a broader hunter-g ...
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Microblade Technology
Microblade technology is a period of technological development marked by the creation and use of small stone blades, which are produced by chipping silica-rich stones like chert, quartz, or obsidian. Blades are a specialized type of lithic flake that are at least twice as long as they are wide. An alternate method of defining blades focuses on production features, including parallel lateral edges and dorsal scars, a lack of cortex, a prepared platform with a broad angle, and a proximal bulb of percussion. Microblades are generally less than 50 mm long in their finished state. History The geographic origin of microblades is poorly understood, with differing theories posing origins in Southern Siberia, Northern China, or the PHSK (Paleo-Hokkaido-Sakhalin-Kurile) peninsula, with dates ranging from over 30,000 BP to as little as 18,000 BP. Because microblade technology is economical (using less raw material than other technologies), relatively easy to make, and extremely porta ...
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Burin (lithic Flake)
Burin from the Upper Paleolithic (Gravettian) (ca. 29,000–22,000 BP) In the field of lithic reduction, a burin (from the French ''burin'', meaning "cold chisel" or modern engraving burin) is a type of handheld lithic flake with a chisel-like edge which prehistoric humans used for engraving or for carving wood or bone. In archaeology, burin use is often associated with "burin spalls", which are a form of debitage created when toolmakers strike a small flake obliquely from the edge of the burin flake in order to form the graving edge. Documented use left, 180px, Carinated "burin"/microblade core with multiple facets Standardized burin usage is typical of the Middle Paleolithic and Upper Palaeolithic cultures in Europe, but archaeologists have also identified them in North American cultural assemblages, and in his book ''Early Man in China'', Jia Lanpo of Beijing University lists dihedral burins and burins for truncation among artifacts uncovered along the banks of the Li ...
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Spear
A spear is a pole weapon consisting of a shaft, usually of wood, with a pointed head. The head may be simply the sharpened end of the shaft itself, as is the case with fire hardened spears, or it may be made of a more durable material fastened to the shaft, such as bone, flint, obsidian, iron, steel, or bronze. The most common design for hunting or combat spears since ancient times has incorporated a metal spearhead shaped like a triangle, lozenge, or leaf. The heads of fishing spears usually feature barbs or serrated edges. The word '' spear'' comes from the Old English '' spere'', from the Proto-Germanic ''speri'', from a Proto-Indo-European root ''*sper-'' "spear, pole". Spears can be divided into two broad categories: those designed for thrusting as a melee weapon and those designed for throwing as a ranged weapon (usually referred to as javelins or darts). The spear has been used throughout human history both as a hunting and fishing tool and as a weapon. Along ...
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