Lithic technological organization of site J69E, Espiritu Santo Island, Baja California Sur

Jennifer Marie Ferris

This thesis provides an in depth study of the lithic technological organization of the late Pleistocene/early Holocene inhabitants of site J69E, located on Espíritu Santo Island, Baja California Sur. This thesis combines concepts from both lithic technological organization studies and human behavioral ecology, to understand economical decisions made regarding toolstone selection and procurement, and tool production, use, and discard. The results suggest the chipped stone assemblage is the result of several economic and environmental factors, but primarily, toolstone source location, toolstone quality, and task requirement. Expectations are first drawn from the model of central place foraging, with considerations of toolstone transportation distances and the costs associated with transporting raw material packages, to understand the relative location and availability of toolstone. If toolstone is distantly located from the site, the costs of transporting toolstone should have been minimized through removing unusable portions of raw material in the field. Furthermore, the selection of different toolstones should be predicated upon their availability, and demonstrated through economical uses of toolstone. In other words, if effort is put into procuring toolstone that is difficult to obtain, one would expect tools to have extended use-lives. Four characteristics of debitage are used as proxies for lithic reduction to determine toolstone location and reduction, and the result of which suggest toolstone is available near the site, and different material types are treated similarly. Patterns of flake tool edge damage indicate that toolstone availability did not influence economic use, but assessments of tool diversity suggest raw material was actively sought for differential use. It follows then that perhaps what is more important at site J69E is toolstone type and quality, and not availability, for tool production and task completion. Through assessment of flake tool metric attributes, it is shown that size differences do exist between toolstone types; however, such differences are likely the result of initial raw material package morphology. Lastly, analyses of flake tool edge damage patterns support differential use between material types.

Lithic technological organization of site J69E, Espiritu Santo Island, Baja California Sur

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