[Bonetools] Wear traces on bone tools
Alice Choyke
h13017cho at iif.hu
Wed Mar 17 15:32:29 CET 2010
Dear Genny,
It would be a good thing to set up an informal meeting of the WBRG at
the ICAZ meetings and good to discuss this issue there AS LONG as there are
other people there who actually do this kind of experimentation. My ideas
are purely theoretical and therefore not worth much more than the paer they
are written on. We need hard-core experimenters like your self there to
provide a backbone for any such discussion.
The website is an example of a good theoretical idea and while it
remained in my hands that's what it stayed. Christian Kuchelmann has
revitalized it. Colleagues from Poland should be contacting all of you
eventually to create that use wear library. I would love the PDF fo that
article. I would hope that in the more benign circumstances of the
Carpathian Basin, use wear is more easily preserved than in the Arctic but
who knows what nasty surprises are out there in the future. No technique in
archaeology ever turns out to be as good or as bad as advertised at first
which is why we all need to work from a variety of points of view.
Alice.
On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 2:11 PM, Genevieve Lemoine <glemoine at bowdoin.edu>wrote:
> Alice,
>
> I think the issue of ‘realistic’ wear has more to do with the range of
> activities (use and non-use) an archaeological tool is exposed to rather
> than the skill (or lack thereof) of the experimenter – I found that wear
> patterns were similar for very broadly similar materials independent of the
> type of use (i.e. Scraping wet hide, cutting snow) despite different tool
> forms and actions. The problems are that the ranges are so broad that use
> wear alone may not really tell us that much, and that non-use activities,
> from transport to post-depositional processes can very, very easily obscure
> wear – even in relatively young (<500 years) samples from a permafrost
> environment I encountered many tools in which the surface was too poorly
> preserved to identify wear. (I can send a pdf of the article to people if
> they wish).
>
> Transferring this information is also very difficult and I’m not sure that
> there is any way around re-inventing the wheel – looking at pictures is only
> useful to a point – you need to look at actual pieces (or good replicas),
> which means either re-doing a set of experiments, or developing a reference
> library not of photographs but of replicas – not impossible by any means.
> That is not to say that pictures are not useful, but I would not really be
> comfortable with training someone solely from photographs. That said, I seem
> to remember sending off a bunch of pictures of wear for the web page, but
> nothing seems to have come of it – do you know what happened?
>
> Of course, blind tests are a vital part of this. Perhaps in Paris we can
> talk about how to set something like that up?
>
>
> Genny
>
>
> --
> Genevieve LeMoine
> Curator/Registrar
> The Peary-MacMillan Arctic Museum and Arctic Studies Center
> Bowdoin College
> 9500 College Station
> Brunswick, Maine 04011
>
> 207-725-3304 (voice)
> 207-725-3499 (fax)
>
> glemoine at bowdoin.edu
>
> http://www.bowdoin.edu/arctic-museum/
> http://www.ilapweb.info/
>
>
>
>
>
> On 3/17/10 8:43 AM, "Alice Choyke" <H13017cho at IIF.HU> wrote:
>
> I still wonder about three issues:
> 1. the question of whether experimenters (in general') really have the
> know-how to produce 'realistic' wear patterns. Most of us are city children
> not people who have been doing this work from childhood.
> 2. the blind-test issue will not go away -
> 3. transferring the wear information to colleagues (like myself) who have
> done little experimentation and have even less experience than the novice
> experimentor. How can we avoid forever 'reinventing the wheel for wear
> studies. n.b the WBRG website would like to psot catalogues of use wear
> pictures for other scholars to reference in their own work.
>
> Alice
>
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 1:14 PM, Boris Santander <
> boris.santander at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Hello to everyone.
>
> I'm preparing my Master dissertation, dealing with traceology in bone
> tools, using experimental methods over soft animal materials (leather and
> whool mainly). Talking with several microanalists, we were in agree about
> the requirement of three main issues:
>
> a)The requirement of a large data base with high resolution pictures, as
> result of experimental activities over diferent materials and with different
> magnification.
>
> b) The documentation over Activities, not just time of activity (we can
> agree about the uselessness of time in the traceological production in one
> determined bone tool). 100 repetitions, 200 hundred, etc...
>
> c) The use of high resolution casts (or if it's possible ESEM microscopes)
> to take control of the marks at diferent stages. i.e. If we will perforate a
> leather with a metapodial awl doing 100 repetitions, take good resolution
> pictures each 25 times. Then, we will be able to identificate the formation
> process of polishes, microchipping, striations, etc.
>
> Personally, I will try to create a web page (maybe a Flickr, considering
> the good quality of the pictures, and simplicity) with my thesis pictures,
> with Creative Commons licence... maybe is usefull for someone, specialy in
> latinamerica or africa, where is harder for us to get access to Journals and
> publications.
>
> Best Wishes to everyone
>
>
> 2010/3/16 <bonetools-request at listserv.niif.hu>
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> 1. Re: Wear traces on bone tools (Alice Choyke)
> 2. Re: Wear traces on bone tools (Katherine M. Moore)
>
>
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Message: 1
> Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 12:32:26 +0100
> From: Alice Choyke <h13017cho at iif.hu>
> Subject: Re: [Bonetools] Wear traces on bone tools
>
> To: "Mailing list for archaeologists of the research group for the
> study of object and waste of bone, antler. ivory and
> horn."
> <bonetools at listserv.niif.hu>
> Message-ID:
> <1655c95a1003150432kce10c32g471ebdd0980cd9e7 at mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="windows-1252"
>
>
> I wish our French colleagues and their French-trained students would take
> part in this debate on 'blind' testing. They, like Genny Lemoine, Sandra
> Olsen, Janet Griffitts and Cristian St.Gates in North America, have been
> collectively involved in various manufacturing and use wear studies using
> high magnifications (binocular and metalurgical microscopes). There is a
> big
> difference between looking at the macro-wear at low (20X) magnifications
> and
> the deep examination of wear patterns at high magnification in terms of the
> reliability of the interpretation in my opinion (high magnification is
> clearly superior). I am also standing at the side-lines in this debate
> however. I do think it is important not to jump into camps about this issue
> but it should be addressed for the future comfort of all of us.
>
> Alice
>
> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 10:43 AM, Anne Brundle
> <Anne.brundle at orkney.gov.uk>wrote:
>
> > I don't know the answer, but I was just thinking about the same question
> > this weekend. My feeling is that many interpretations of wear on bone
> > tools are based on the three elements of (i)surface shine (ii)rounding
> > on edges and (iii)presence and direction of striations, and then on
> > whether the wear is 'light', 'normal' or 'heavy'. These value terms tend
> > to change, depending what the observer is accustomed to seeing and what
> > they have been looking at most recently, so it becomes difficult to make
> > comparisons between sites.
> >
> > I tend to feel cautious if trace analysis is interpreted too positively,
> > but I would love to hear from people who could make it work - it would
> > be so good!
> >
> > Best wishes
> > Anne
> >
> > Anne Brundle
> > Curator of Archaeology
> > The Orkney Museum
> > Tankerness House
> > Broad Street
> > Kirkwall
> > Orkney
> > KW17 2JD
> >
> >
> > -----Original Message-----
> > From: bonetools-bounces at listserv.niif.hu
> > [mailto:bonetools-bounces at listserv.niif.hu<bonetools-bounces at listserv.niif.hu>]
> On Behalf Of Katherine M.
> > Moore
> > Sent: 12 March 2010 17:35
> > To: Mailing list for archaeologists of the research group for the study
> > ofobjectand waste of bone, antler. ivory and horn.
> > Subject: [Bonetools] Wear traces on bone tools
> >
> > Dear Colleagues:
> >
> > I am seeking general insights (or perhaps opinions) on trace analysis
> > of bone tools. Various studies describe characteristics of traces
> > left on bone by common materials (plant material, hide, soil, etc.).
> > Is there a recent reference which establishes the characteristics of
> > these traces using sytematic studies of modern bone tools? Even more
> > importantly, are there blind tests of identification of worked
> > material on bone tools such as those conducted by Keeley and Newcomer
> > for stone tools? Those blind tests and others which followed have
> > shown that such identifications of worked material on stone tools are
> > probably not reliable. Do bone tool studies have better foundation?
> >
> > Thanks for your help and experience.
> >
> > best,
> >
> > Kate Moore
> > Consulting Scholar
> > University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology
> > 3260 South St.
> > Philadelphia, PA 19104 USA
> >
> >
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> Message: 2
> Date: Mon, 15 Mar 2010 15:27:06 -0400
> From: "Katherine M. Moore" <kmmoore at sas.upenn.edu>
> Subject: Re: [Bonetools] Wear traces on bone tools
>
> To: "Mailing list for archaeologists of the research group for the
> study of object and waste of bone, antler. ivory and horn."
> <bonetools at listserv.niif.hu>
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