Some of those almost look blade size. What do you use as a cut off between the 2? I once measured the width of a bunch of blades and microblades from the same site and got a bipolar distribution - the cutoff between the 2 ended up at around 100 mm. Do you find something similar? Patrick
That's a good point. The biggest ones in this photo are in the 60-70mm range, but I agree - once stuff crosses the 80-100mm range I'm not comfortable calling them microblades anymore. Width is important too, I'd have a tough time calling something more than 15-20mm wide a microblade.
Now that you mention it, it seems like Newfoundland would be a good place to do metrics on blades vs. microblades. We have 3 distinct cultures in the Province who made similar tools and each particular variant is considered diagnostic, but I'm not aware of any metric analyses that puts hard numbers on the categories. Maybe there's an honours thesis that I'm not aware of? The Maritime Archaic made big "blades", the Palaeoeskimo made neat "microblades" on specially prepared cores and the Recent Indians made "Linear Flakes" which probably had similar functions, but were more expediently made. Someone could spend a few days measuring collections and see what the numbers say.
Some of those almost look blade size. What do you use as a cut off between the 2? I once measured the width of a bunch of blades and microblades from the same site and got a bipolar distribution - the cutoff between the 2 ended up at around 100 mm. Do you find something similar? Patrick
ReplyDeleteThat's a good point. The biggest ones in this photo are in the 60-70mm range, but I agree - once stuff crosses the 80-100mm range I'm not comfortable calling them microblades anymore. Width is important too, I'd have a tough time calling something more than 15-20mm wide a microblade.
ReplyDeleteNow that you mention it, it seems like Newfoundland would be a good place to do metrics on blades vs. microblades. We have 3 distinct cultures in the Province who made similar tools and each particular variant is considered diagnostic, but I'm not aware of any metric analyses that puts hard numbers on the categories. Maybe there's an honours thesis that I'm not aware of? The Maritime Archaic made big "blades", the Palaeoeskimo made neat "microblades" on specially prepared cores and the Recent Indians made "Linear Flakes" which probably had similar functions, but were more expediently made. Someone could spend a few days measuring collections and see what the numbers say.