A microburin is a characteristic waste product from manufacture of lithic tools — sometimes confused with an authentic
burin — which is characteristic of the
Mesolithic, but which has been recorded from the end of the
Upper Paleolithic
The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories coin ...
until the
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 ...
. This type of lithic artifact was first named by
Henri Breuil who defined it as "a type of angular, smooth, with a terminal retouch in the form of a small notch". Breuil initially thought that the microburins had a functional use as a type of microlithic burin. However, he later came to realize that the manufacturing technique was different from that of the burin and that they could be waste products from the manufacture of
microliths
A microlith is a small stone tool usually made of flint or chert and typically a centimetre or so in length and half a centimetre wide. They were made by humans from around 35,000 to 3,000 years ago, across Europe, Africa, Asia and Australia. Th ...
, but they may have occasionally been reused for a useful purpose, which is expected for parsimonious lithic resource exploitation
A microburin is a fragment of a
lithic flake, or more precisely, of a
lithic blade
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 ...
, that shows on its upper face the beginnings of a notch terminating in an oblique flection (whose surface can only be seen from the lower side) that ends in a very acute trihedral apex. It was thought that microburins were exclusively a class of functional microliths, but knapping experiments, along with the refitting of contiguous pieces, have demonstrated that they are a characteristic waste product of an advanced lithic reduction process known as
microburin technique - or more correctly, microburin blow technique, following a study of thousands of microburins originating from a variety of
Saharan sites.
Jacques Tixier 250px, Jacques Tixier
Jacques Tixier (1 January 1925 – 3 April 2018) was a French archaeologist and prehistorian notable for his work on prehistory in Qatar, Lebanon, and North Africa. He led the first French archaeological mission to Qatar in 19 ...
noted that none of the examples studied showed unambiguous
traces of intentional use, which also validates observation of lack of use wear from analysis of European pieces.
Examples found in Europe can be seen on this page : https://web.archive.org/web/20090131231751/http://archeobase.be/page_microburins_meso.html, which are associated with Mesolithic hunters of the
Walloon region
Wallonia (; french: Wallonie ), or ; nl, Wallonië ; wa, Waloneye or officially the Walloon Region (french: link=no, Région wallonne),; nl, link=no, Waals gewest; wa, link=no, Redjon walone is one of the three regions of Belgium—alo ...
of
Belgium
Belgium, ; french: Belgique ; german: Belgien officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. The country is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeast, France to th ...
(approximately 9,000 BP).
There is also a particular type of microburin named after Krukowski
[Krukowski, Stefan (1914) - "Un nouveau rebut du microlithique". Extrait des ''Comptes Rendus de la Société Scientifique de Varsovie''] that is from a ''carving accident'' and not a waste byproduct.
See also
*
Microlith
*
Microburin technique
Notes
{{reflist
Lithics
Archaeological artefact types