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Observations on the Technique of Production of Szeletian Flint Implements
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 May 2014
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It is widely accepted by specialists in the Old Stone Age that the Szeletian culture in Hungary developed directly from the local Mousterian. Apart from the chronological evidence, this theory is based on a few bifacially worked Mousterian implements. It is not without interest to investigate this supposed process of evolution also from the point of view of the technique of implement-making. The problem is to decide whether the retouch of the Early Szeletian implements found in the Bükk Mountains in Hungary could have evolved from the Mousterian retouch, which comes down to the question of their mutual relationship considered from the point of view of process of manufacture. We approached this problem along two lines: (1) we conducted laboratory experiments to clear up certain technological problems of stone implement flaking; and (2) we measured the angle between the retouch and the flat bulbar face of the implements from finds of various Palaeolithic cultures in Hungary.
In the course of our experiments we constructed a device that precisely measured the force and the direction of the blow applied in flaking. This proved that a blow striking a tabular flint with parallel faces or a thick glass plate vertically, produces a conic crack with included angle of about 100° to 110°. With flint-like materials, used in the making of Old Stone Age implements, this cone can be considered as more or less constant. Our experiments confirmed Leakey's observation according to which the cone produced when striking the edge of a piece of flint is incomplete, i.e., part of it may be supposed to continue beyond the flake. We set ourselves the task of establishing the relationship between the angle of the fracture of the real cone resulting from the blow administered and the angle of the direction of the blow.
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- Copyright © The Prehistoric Society 1960
References
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