archdata (version 1.0)

Acheulean: Seven African Acheulean Sites

Description

Stone tool assemblage data from a paper by Lewis Binford (1972). The sites include Olorgesailie, Isimila, Kalambo Falls, Lochard, Kariandusi, Broken Hill, and Nsongezi. Data include approximate latitude and longitude for each site as well as the frequency for each of 12 stone tool types.

Usage

data(Acheulean)

encoding

UTF-8

source

Binford, L. R. 1972. Contemporary Model Building: Paradigms and the Current State of Paleolithic Research. In Models in Archaeology, edited by D. L. Clarke, pp 109--166. Methuen.

Details

Binford (1972) presents the percentages for 12 tool types at 32 assemblages from 7 sites (including Olorgesailie) which was based on Maxine Kleindienst's analysis of Lower Paleolithic Acheulean sites in Africa (1961 and 1962). The data were also analyzed by Glynn Isaac (1977). To create the Acheulean data set, the percentages in the original publication have been converted back to counts by dividing by 100 and multiplying by the number of tools. The assemblages from each site are summed. The largest assemblage is Kalambo Falls with 1349 artifacts and the smallest is Broken Hill (Kabwe) with 94. The rownames identify each site and an attribute named Variables provides variable labels for each column.

References

Isaac, Glynn Ll. 1977. Olorgesailie: Archeological Studies of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya. University of Chicago. Kleindienst, Maxine R. 1961. Variability within the Late Acheulian assemblage in East Africa. South African Archaeological Bulletin 16: 35--52. Kleindienst, Maxine R. 1962. Components of the East African Acheulian assemblage: an analytic approach. In Actes du IVe Congrès Panafricain de Préhistoire et de l’Étude du Quaternaire, ed. C. Mortelmans and J. Nenquin, pp 81-105.

Examples

data(Acheulean)
# Compute percentages for each assemblage
Acheulean.pct <- prop.table(as.matrix(Acheulean[,3:14]), 1)*100
round(Acheulean.pct, 2)
plot(OST~HA, Acheulean.pct)
boxplot(Acheulean.pct)