HAL will be down for maintenance from Friday, June 10 at 4pm through Monday, June 13 at 9am. More information
Skip to Main content Skip to Navigation
Journal articles

Early Use of Pressure Flaking on Lithic Artifacts at Blombos Cave, South Africa

Vincent Mourre 1, 2 Paola Villa 3 Christopher Henshilwood 4
1 TRACES - Travaux et recherches archéologiques sur les cultures, les espaces et les sociétés
2 Inrap, Nîmes - Institut national de recherches archéologiques préventives, centre archéologique de Nîmes
3 University of Colorado Museum
4 UiB - University of Bergen
Abstract : Pressure flaking has been considered to be an Upper Paleolithic innovation dating to ~20,000 years ago (20 ka). Replication experiments show that pressure flaking best explains the morphology of lithic artifacts recovered from the ~75-ka Middle Stone Age levels at Blombos Cave, South Africa. The technique was used during the final shaping of Still Bay bifacial points made on heat‐treated silcrete. Application of this innovative technique allowed for a high degree of control during the detachment of individual flakes, resulting in thinner, narrower, and sharper tips on bifacial points. This technology may have been first invented and used sporadically in Africa before its later widespread adoption.
Document type :
Journal articles
Complete list of metadata
https://hal-inrap.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal-02023234
Contributor : Vincent Mourre Connect in order to contact the contributor
Submitted on : Monday, February 18, 2019 - 2:19:58 PM
Last modification on : Monday, May 9, 2022 - 11:58:08 AM

Identifiers

Collections

INRAP | CNRS | EHESS | TRACES | UNIV-TLSE2

Citation

Vincent Mourre, Paola Villa, Christopher Henshilwood. Early Use of Pressure Flaking on Lithic Artifacts at Blombos Cave, South Africa. Science, American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), 2010, 330 (6004), pp.659-662. ⟨10.1126/science.1195550⟩. ⟨hal-02023234⟩

Export

BibTeX TEI DC DCterms EndNote Datacite

Share

Metrics

Record views

66