Use-Wear Analysis on Flint Tools. Beyond the Methodological Issues

Abstract

Since the onset of use-wear studies of lithic assemblages, many researchers have focused their analyses on flint tools mainly because: 1. Within archaeological Iithic assemblages tlint is the most represented raw material, mostly from Middle and Upper Palaeolithic contexts; 2. Flint lithology is the most studied Iithic raw material by specialists; 3. Wear alterations in flint elements are most diagnostic since modifications occur in very different traces and within few minutes of work. Fortunately, during recent years researchers started looking at other raw materials such as obsidian, quartz, quartzite, etc. (Clemente et al. this volume). Since the origins of the use-wear analysis discipline, methodological questions were always one of the most important issues for researchers, for which huge improvements have been made in technical advances in the fie ld of computer science, microscopy technology and photographic record. Parallel to these technological advances, continuous improvements have been made on the identification of wear trace diversity, such as postdeposition processes, using severa] experimental blind tests.