2025/01/21 by Simon Wyatt‐Spratt · 1 voice · 1 citation
Earth and Planetary Sciences · Engineering · Social Sciences · #Archaeology #Archaeology and Rock Art Studies #Archaeology and ancient environmental studies #Core (optical fiber) #Ecology #Engineering #Geography #History #Indigenous #Indigenous culture #Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology
paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/01977261.2025.2451546
openalex publication_date 2025/01/21 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/06/15
One of the biggest impediments to the analysis of cores in the archaeology of Indigenous Australia is the slippery use of terminology. This impairs comparative analyses and limits our ability to extrapolate meaningful information from our lithic analyses. This situation has resulted from a history of poorly articulated theoretical and methodological frameworks. While there has been some discussion and debate about the interpretative frameworks used to interpret the results of lithic analysis, the theoretical underpinnings of lithic analysis in Australia have only occasionally been interrogated. This has led to a situation where the same terminology for basic concepts in lithic analysis is used across Australia, but with different meanings depending on the archaeologist who is using it. The aim of this paper is to explore how the historical development of lithic analysis in Australia has resulted in the same terminology for cores being used in subtly but fundamentally different ways.