The effect of raw material properties on flake and flake-tool dimensions: a comparison between quartz and chert

Mikael A. Manninen Published in: Quaternary International Volume 424, 7 December 2016, Pages 24-31 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.quaint.2015.12.096

Abstract Experimental studies suggest that the high fragmentation tendency of vein quartz can be controlled to some degree by favorable technological choices, i.e., by producing thicker artifacts and by using bipolar-on-anvil reduction. In this paper I explore the question of whether strategies that reduce quartz fragmentation were used in prehistory and present data that suggest that this was often the case. It has been suggested that due to its fragmentation proneness vein quartz should have been avoided by highly mobile groups when raw materials of better flakeability and controllability were available because of higher transportation costs and greater risk of raw material failure when using quartz. The data presented here shows that quartz nevertheless was not always avoided by highly mobile groups but that the inclusion of quartz into the raw material base necessitated the acceptance of thicker tools when using relatively large flake blanks, or the use of technological strategies that compensated for the risk of failure when relatively thin quartz flakes were in use.

Keywords: Quartz, raw material properties, flake-tools, flake thickness, lithic technology, hunter–gatherers

1. Introduction

Flake fragmentation during and after reduction is known to happen regardless of the lithic raw material in use. It is well known that core reduction always produces flakes that are broken in half longitudinally or transversely (e.g., Inizan et al. 1999, pp. 34–35; Hiscock 2002; Jennings 2011). The fragmentation proneness of flakes, however, is raw material dependent and raw materials such as macrocrystalline vein quartz, which has low tensile and compressive strengths and a generally large degree of internal flaws, mostly related to geological processes affecting the formation and state of vein quartz, are more likely to break both during and after reduction (e.g., Schick 1986, pp. 20–42; Callahan et al. 1992; Domanski et al. 1994; Mourre 1996; Knutsson 1998; de Lomberda Hermida 2009; Tallavaara et al. 2010; Pargeter 2011).

Although quartz flakes tend to break into pieces partly as a result of faults in the material, the heavy fragmentation caused by percussion mostly happens because of radial fractures that advance from the point of impact and simultaneous transverse fractures caused by the flake bending during detachment (e.g., Cotterell and Kamminga 1990, p.129; Callahan et al. 1992; Driscoll 2010; Tallavaara et al. 2010). Often these breaks happen simultaneously and the fragility of the material leads to large amounts of waste in the form of small fragments and shatter which are so common at quartz knapping floors (Fig. 1).

1 Despite the proneness of quartz to break during reduction and use, causing it to be in most cases unfavorable for technologies that require good control of the core and aim at standardized flake forms, such as prismatic core blade production, it was in some instances used for making relatively large tools, such as scrapers and arrowheads from flake blanks, even by groups with considerable residential mobility (e.g., Kuhn et al. 1996; Thacker 2002; de la Peña and Wadley 2014; Manninen and Knutsson 2014).

The organization of lithic technology among residentially mobile groups is a recurrent topic in the study of prehistoric hunter–gatherers. There are a multitude of factors that affect lithic technological solutions of mobile peoples, but from an ecological (and organizational, see Manninen 2014a; Kuhn and Miller 2015) perspective three dimensions are often considered the most important, that is, transport cost, reliability when needed in encounter hunting, and the availability of raw material (see e.g., Surovell 2009).

From studies of human behavior it is known that people that move a lot tend to keep the weight they carry around preferably low (e.g., Bird 1997; Monahan 1998, for ethnoarchaeological examples). Therefore it can be assumed that hunter–gatherers will generally avoid carrying around rocks with a large share of unusable material (e.g., Parry and Kelly 1987; Kelly 1988; Rasic and Andrefsky 2001; Beck et al. 2002; Hertell and Tallavaara 2011; see also Shott 1986). It is also clear that people that rely on encounter hunting to get food, do not want the arrow- or spearhead to break at the most critical moment. Also the time and energy invested in raw material acquisition can be increased only up to a point. Therefore the availability of raw material that enables the successful production of the lithic parts of the tool-and-weapons system plays an important role in the overall organization of technology (e.g., Kuhn 1991; Andrefsky 1994a; Surovell 2009, pp. 187–191).

Because of its wastefulness, unpredictability, and fragility, it seems evident that when carrying costs or reliability are of concern, quartz is a problematic raw material (Tallavaara et al. 2010). This is because of the potentially very large amount of waste in a core of macrocrystalline quartz and the high risk of unintentional breakage if carried around as flakes or tools with thin un-retouched edges. Instead of highly mobile groups, it would seem better suited for more sedentary hunter–gatherers that do not have the need to carry things around as much and are also likely to have decreased dependence on encounter hunting of large terrestrial animals.

However, there were situations in which chert or materials with chert-like workability were not all the time available for hunter–gatherers, or not available at all (e.g., Gould et al. 1977; Callahan 1987; Rankama et al. 2006; Arias et al. 2009; see also Mourre 1994). This kind of situations occurred especially in areas where raw material packages of better workability or smaller waste content are scarce or unevenly distributed, and were sometimes the consequence of decreasing ranges or territorial shifts caused by changes in food availability (Kriiska et al. 2011; Manninen and Knutsson 2014; Manninen et al. in press). In these situations the use of vein quartz was often not avoidable, and a trade-off between raw material availability and raw

2 material quality led to the use of vein quartz even in highly mobile toolkits (see Ellis 1989 for a discussion of the benefits of this kind of strategy).

Since also groups with high residential mobility in some cases did use macrocrystalline quartz for making relatively large flake tools, we can expect that they would have looked for ways to increase the utility of the raw material by controlling and reducing fragmentation during production and use.

1.1. Ways of decreasing the fragmentation of vein quartz in lithic production

There probably are several ways of decreasing the fragmentation of quartz flakes in lithic production, such as optimal hammer hardness, the use of smooth "neo-cortical" surfaces as striking platforms (Tavoso 1978, p. 34; Mourre 1994, p.19; 1996, p. 209), and the regulation of fracture propagation and flake attributes (Tallavaara et al. 2010). In this study the focus is on possible controlling of flake length and thickness.

In quartz reduction experiments conducted at Uppsala University a larger proportion of intact flakes was achieved using bipolar-on-anvil knapping on vein quartz (the vertical axial method, see van der Drift 2001 in Diez-Martín et al. 2011: Fig.1) than by reduction employing freehand platform cores. While only 16–23% of detachments produced using freehand platform reduction in four separate reduction sequences stayed intact, four sequences with bipolar-on-anvil reduction produced 31–57% intact flakes (Callahan et al. 1992; Knutsson and Lindgren 2004).

Although quartz flakes produced by vertical axial bipolar reduction stayed intact more often than platform flakes in the Uppsala experiments and bipolar-on-anvil reduction has also other advantages when working with quartz, such as ease of flake removal (Gurtov and Eren 2014) and the possibility to work with small raw material packages (e.g., Flenniken 1980:, p. 30; de la Peña and Wadley 2014; Hiscock 2015), there is ample evidence that platform reduction was used to produce blanks for scrapers and arrowheads of vein quartz (e.g., Clarkson 2007, pp. 99–100; Manninen and Tallavaara 2011; de la Peña and Wadley 2014).

A series of experiments conducted at the University of Helsinki (Tallavaara et al. 2010) were focused specifically on freehand platform reduction. The main purpose of these experiments was to study whether the frequency of the diverse fragment types in core reduction is related to hammer type or choices made by individual knappers, and therefore there was no attempt to intentionally reduce fragmentation. The experiments resulted in 413 quartz detachments of which the 298 broken flakes (72% of all detachments) were conjoined and their properties studied against the 115 flakes (28% of all detachments) that did not break. One of the results was that relatively thicker fakes had better odds of staying intact (Tallavaara 2007b, pp. 61-62; Tallavaara et al. 2010). This indicates that to reduce the fragmentation of quartz flakes when using freehand platform flaking, relatively thicker flakes have to be produced.

3 From the poor elasticity due to low tensile strength and the frequently occurring relatively high degree of internal flaws, it can be hypothesized that also the production of relatively shorter flakes could be used to reduce quartz flake fragmentation. Although there have been attempts to develop methods to reconstruct the size of the tool blank from retouched tools (e.g., Dibble and Pelcin 1995; Eren et al. 2005), due to factors related to retouch location and use-life of tools the length of the original blank usually cannot be reliably studied from discarded tools (e.g., Davis and Shea 1998; Shott et al. 2000; Shott and Weedman 2007). Nevertheless, the in average smaller size of quartz flakes and artifacts, in comparison to other raw materials, has been observed in some studies (e.g., Hiscock and Hall 1988; Leng 1988:427; Bracco 1993; Wadley and Mohapi 2007; but see Siiriäinen 1977; Seong 2004). To investigate to what degree the strategy of producing relatively thicker flakes and the possible strategy of producing relatively shorter flakes to reduce fragmentation when using quartz were employed by prehistoric knappers, three simple hypotheses can be formulated and tested with archaeological data:

Hypothesis #1: If the fragmentation of quartz flakes was intentionally reduced by making shorter flakes, quartz flakes should be shorter when compared with flakes produced from better workability raw materials in the same assemblage.

Hypothesis #2: If the fragmentation of quartz flakes was commonly reduced by making relatively thicker flakes, quartz flakes should often be on average relatively thicker than flakes produced from better workability raw materials in the same assemblage.

Hypothesis #3. If the production of relatively thicker quartz flakes was used to deliberately reduce the fragmentation of flake-tool blanks and use-breakage of flake tools, then tools made on quartz flake-blanks should be relatively thicker than counterparts made of better workability raw materials in the same technological system.

2. Material and methods: treatment of the archaeological data

Tallavaara et al. (2010; see also Tallavaara 2007b) found that in two datasets from eastern Fennoscandia quartz tools in archaeological assemblages follow the expectation of increased thickness of quartz artifacts. In this study these data are increased to include four datasets representing 39 hunter–gatherer sites in eastern and northern Fennoscandia and published data from 10 sites with a wide geographical and chronological coverage (Table 1). Since the focus in this study is on the properties of quartz as a raw material, technological difference caused by chronological and geographical distance between datasets was considered of minor importance. The only requirements a dataset had to meet were the availability of mean length and thickness measurements of intact flakes and/or tools, the presence of both vein quartz and raw materials of clearly better workability (mainly flint or chert) in the assemblage, and a set of comparable artifacts (the 4 same tool type or flakes deriving from similar cores, Table 2) produced from these raw materials. Median values of flake thickness and length would reduce the effect of possible outliers in the data but they were not available in most cases. However, the coefficient of variation of length and width values in the assemblages is below 0,7 which indicates that variation is low.

The data are derived from datasets representing formal tools from multiple sites within a technocomplex as well as from site assemblages. Some data from archaeological assemblages with only quartz (four sites) are also used to get a better understanding of quartz flake size (Tables 1 and 2). Flakes produced with freehand platform reduction are not separated from bipolar-on-anvil flakes in the analyses. The question of adequate data, i.e., representativity, is difficult to assess in this type of study. However, if there exists a relationship between (intact) quartz flake dimensions which is strictly raw material dependent, it should remain the same regardless of data size and can be further evaluated in future studies. It is worth emphasizing that in eastern and northern Fennoscandia hunting, fishing, and gathering, i.e., subsistence strategies in most cases associated with frequent residential mobility (see, e.g., Kelly 2013), were replaced by agriculture and animal husbandry later than the studied assemblages were formed (Mökkönen 2010; Lahtinen and Rowley-Conwy 2013). The rest of the assemblages derive from differing contexts in terms of group mobility but in most cases represent residentially mobile groups.

In order to study flake length, also raw material package size and raw material availability has to be taken into account. Scarcity of raw material can be expected to lead to intensified reduction (Dibble et al. 1995; Blades 2001) causing an increased amount of relatively shorter flakes, while especially in simple technologies differing raw material package size is likely to affect flake length. The size range of both the end products and the raw material packages available at sites included in this study, however, are similar, as far as can be inferred from published descriptions (Tables 1 and 2). It is also clear that these variables are likely to affect flake length but relative thickness values should not be affected. Each tool dataset represents only a single flake tool type from multiple sites, making the tool datasets even less likely to be affected by raw material package size.

Simple statistics were used to study the dimensions of intact flakes and tools in the dataset. The analyses were straightforward comparisons of the mean size of complete quartz flakes to the size of complete flakes of chert and chert-like raw materials (flint, chert, silcrete, and in a few tools from northernmost Fennoscandia an extremely fine grained chert-like quartzite) and a comparison of relative thickness of quartz tools and flakes to counterparts made of chert and chert-like raw materials in the same assemblages. For this purpose a relative thickness index (thickness:length) was calculated for tools and flakes. This index gives a comparable thickness value for flakes and tools of all sizes. Statistical significance of observed differences in flake and tool dimensions was studied with the permutation version of Wilcoxon-Mann-Whitney test, provided by coin package in R statistical software (Hothorn et al. 2008; R Development Core Team 2012).

5 3. Results

The mean length of complete quartz flakes in the studied assemblages varies between 11.6–29.0 mm (median value 14.2 mm) while the mean length of flakes of chert-like raw materials is 10.3–26.3 mm (median value 14.5 mm). In those assemblages where the mean length of flakes can be compared between raw materials, complete quartz flakes, although small, do not differ in length from flakes of chert-like raw materials (Fig. 2; Z = -0.1314, p < 0.91). The four Irish datasets with only quartz flakes (Driscoll 2010) stand out from the rest as they include on average clearly longer and relatively thicker flakes than the assemblages with two or more raw materials.

The relative thickness of quartz flakes and tools when compared to counterparts made of less problematic raw materials, however, reveals a clear difference (Figs. 3, 4). Quartz artifacts have a clearly higher relative thickness than the artifacts made of chert-like raw materials in the same datasets (flakes: Z = -3.3312, p < 0.00045; tools: Z = -2.0579, p < 0.043).

4. Discussion

The results do not support the hypothesis that flake fragmentation was controlled by producing shorter flakes from quartz (Hypothesis #1). There does not seem to be any significant difference between the average length of complete quartz and chert flakes in those assemblages in which both are present. However, it can be questioned whether the site assemblages actually allow the studying of intended flake length since it is probable that most suitable flakes were removed from the assemblages for making tools and for the most part flakes that are not suited for the production of desired tool forms are left at the site. Therefore this result alone does not exclude the possibility that production of relatively shorter quartz flakes could be a strategy for reducing fragmentation. The experimental assemblage produced in the Helsinki experiments (Tallavaara et al. 2010) indicates that in an assemblage not affected by selection bias the median length of intact flakes tends to be a few millimeters shorter than the length of broken and reassembled flakes (Fig. 5; Z = 2.1084, p < 0.035), but the difference in length is by no means substantial. However, as these experiments were not aimed at producing flake-tool blanks, more studies are needed to further test the first hypothesis.

The relative thickness of flakes at sites with both quartz and raw materials of better workability and durability present, however, suggests that quartz flakes were almost systematically made thicker than the flakes made of raw materials less prone to breakage. This result gives support to hypothesis #2 and suggests that production of relatively thicker flakes from quartz was a strategy commonly employed by quartz users across a wide chronological and geographical span. It is noteworthy that there is a clear difference in the relative thickness of the flake groups regardless of the fact that waste flakes, and to some degree also bipolar- on-anvil flakes, are included in the data and are likely to affect the result in this case also.

6 Vertical axial bipolar-on-anvil reduction is often perceived as a way of maximizing raw material use when availability is low or recycling of freehand cores is practical for some other reason (e.g., Goodyear 1993; Andrefsky 1994b; de la Peña and Wadley 2014). However, it was a common method used to produce quartz flakes in many areas where the availability of quartz was not a problem (e.g., Flenniken 1980; Callahan 1987; Kuhn et al. 1996; Hertell and Manninen 2005; Eren et al. 2013) which suggests that it was used for other reasons, probably related to raw material properties (see Gurtov and Eren 2014; Kuhn et al. 1996). One such property is the possibility to produce relatively thinner intact flakes and flakes of more even thickness when compared to platform reduction (Callahan et al. 1992; Knutsson and Lindgren 2004; see also Goodyear 1993). Therefore it is probable that a large proportion of bipolar-on-anvil flakes affects the mean relative thickness of intact flakes in an assemblage. This may be reflected in the lower relative thickness index values for flakes when compared to tools. The results show that the mean relative thickness of quartz flake-tools is greater than that of comparable tools of chert and chert-like materials (Fig. 4) and therefore support hypothesis #3 and imply that the use of quartz flake-tools in most cases resulted in the production and use of on average thicker flakes.

The reasons for making the relatively large formal flake-tools of quartz thicker than counterparts of less fragile raw materials were probably twofold: increasing the relative thickness of flakes secures a greater proportion of intact flakes and consequently reduces the waste content of a core (Tallavaara et al. 2010), while a greater thickness:length ratio makes tools more durable in use (Chesier and Kelly 2006).

This has obvious implications not only for mobile groups but to all users of quartz. In case of expedient un- hafted tools, increased relative thickness is not a problem but with hafted tools variation in the thickness of the lithic part causes problems in retooling. There are, however, indications that such problems could be managed with favorable choices in tool design. The tools with the smallest relative thickness in both raw material categories among the studied datasets are oblique arrowheads (Manninen and Tallavaara 2011) which have a mean relative thickness of 0,21 when made of quartz (mean thickness 4 mm) and 0,16 when made of chert (mean thickness 3,2 mm). The dimensions of these arrowheads are likely to be to a large degree dictated by the arrow technology and especially by the hafting mechanism. The way of hafting can be assumed to have been the same regardless of the raw material used, especially if shafts were reused after arrowhead breakage. This would explain the somewhat smaller difference in relative thickness if compared to the scraper datasets. However, in the case of oblique arrowheads, the thinness of the quartz projectile point seems to have been compensated for by standardly orienting the arrowhead perpendicular in relation to the blank in a way that made the un-retouched cutting edge sturdier than was necessary for counterparts made of chert (Manninen and Tallavaara 2011).

Eren et al. (2014) showed in an experimental study of hand-axe production that differing flaking properties do not necessarily prevent the manufacture of tools of equal dimensions from different raw materials. The results based on archaeological data presented here, together with earlier experimental data on quartz

7 fragmentation (Callahan et al. 1992; Knutsson and Lindgren 2004; Tallavaara et al. 2010), suggest that vein quartz as a lithic raw material has properties, or constraints, that also do not necessarily prevent the manufacture of simple flake tools of equal dimensions from quartz and chert, but makes it unpractical in terms of wastefulness and reliability when it comes to using the tools and raw material in practice (see Yonekura 2015 for analogous results concerning preferential use of relatively harder raw materials with better crack propagation and edge properties in core blade manufacture in Upper Paleolithic Japan).

It must be noted, however, that relatively large intact flakes of quartz are necessary only for the production of relatively large flake-tools. Unmodified quartz flakes and flake fragments provide a diverse set of sharp edges that are possible to use as cutting and scraping tools and there is ample evidence in the archaeological record of technologies that integrate small quartz flakes and fragments into systems in which these artifact types are used as un-hafted expedient tools or as simple working edges in composite tools and weapons together with wood, antler, or bone (e.g., Flenniken 1980; Knutsson 1990; Rankama 2009; Taipale et al. 2014; Knutsson et al. 2015; see also Manninen et al. in press).

Hence, while increasing the relative thickness of flakes is a strategy that increases the utility of vein quartz, especially when producing relatively larger flake-tools, it must be emphasized that the utility of the raw material could be also increased by adopting a technological system in which the effects of problems caused by heavy fragmentation were reduced by other means.

5. Conclusion

The results presented here using a larger dataset give support to the earlier suggestion by Tallavaara et al. (2010) that there are ways to reduce quartz fragmentation and that quartz users intentionally reduced fragmentation by producing thicker flakes. In the studied assemblages differences in raw material properties between quartz and more resilient raw materials seem to have determined the dimensions of flakes and tools. Based on the results presented here, it can be suggested that the production of thicker flakes, as well as other means of increasing the utility of vein quartz as a stone tool raw material, were strategies commonly employed by knappers in a variety of contexts worldwide.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this special issue for the invitation to write this paper. Thomas Jennings and an anonymous reviewer for commenting and thereby improving the manuscript. I also thank Miikka Tallavaara, Tuija Rankama, and Esa Hertell (University of Helsinki) for giving access to unpublished data important for this study and Miikka Tallavaara for comments and help with the statistical tests. The analyses of the Oblique arrowhead and Scrapers 1 and 2 datasets were financed by The Finnish Cultural Foundation. The paper was written as a part of the Pioneers of North-Western Europe. Determining the hidden sources of human colonisation of Norway project led by Per Persson (University of Oslo, Museum of Cultural History). 8 References

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Figures & Captions

Figure 1. Typical shattered quartz flake with several angular fragments and a large proportion of small chips/ dust. Freehand percussion with antler hammer. Photo: Mikael A. Manninen.

16 Figure 2. Mean length/mean thickness ratios of intact flakes of quartz (grey diamonds) and chert and chert- like raw materials (black diamonds) in the studied assemblages. Abbreviations refer to site names given in Table 1.

Figure 3. The relative thickness (mean thickness:mean length) of intact quartz flakes and flakes of chert and chert-like (flint and silcrete) raw materials. The whiskers show maximum and minimum values and the boxes the first and third quartiles and the median value (horizontal line).

17 Figure 4. The relative thickness (mean thickness/mean length) of quartz tools and counterparts made of chert. Only data from datasets representing comparable artifacts of both quartz and chert (and in one case chert-like quartzite) are included. The whiskers show maximum and minimum values and the boxes the first and third quartiles and the median value (horizontal line).

Figure 5. The length of intact (N=115, mean length 34,5 mm) and broken but reassemblable (N=201, mean length 37,6 mm) quartz flakes from eight experimental freehand platform reduction series (Tallavaara et al. 2010; UHMIP 2009). The whiskers show maximum and minimum values and the boxes the first and third quartiles and the median value (horizontal line).

18 Table 1. The dataset of mean thickness and mean length values of complete flakes and tools of quartz and chert (including chert-like materials). a) Includes silcrete, b) Includes flint, c) Chert-like quartzite, d) Late Mesolithic oblique arrowheads from 30 Finnish sites, e) Four Late Mesolithic oblique arrowhead sites (Devdis 1, Mavdnaavzi 2, Rastklippan, Vuopaja) from northernmost Finland, Norway, and Sweden, f) Four pottery-Mesolithic sites (Karpankangas, Kattelus, Klemolan seisake, Meskäärtty) from south-eastern Finland.

19 Table 2. Quartz and chert package size, availability, and amounts in the site assemblages used in the flake analysis, alongside short descriptions of flaking technology. See Table 1 for references.

20