Discussion questions
Please write notes to these questions on the back of today's P+L handout.
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Please read the
Notes for Students
section in the ReadMe file. Also pay attention to this quote from the
“Data” section:
Read the quote
Each of the 155 rows is one technology or set of technologies reported in a publication by another author, and these were gathered by Paige and Perreault into one geolocated dataset. The dataset is not one artefact or site per row. Every row is coded for the presence or absence of the same 33 procedural units (manufacturing steps).
- 145 archaeological entries, drawn from 100 sites
- 5 non-human primate tool-making behaviours
- 5 technologies produced in controlled flintknapping experiments (i.e., experimental archaeology)
- Coverage: ~3.3 million years ago to the 19th century CE
Sections of the visualizer use a color-coding system to help highlight techniques relevant to our course. In the “Chart” tab above, make sure you read the note underneath the graph.
Your task: make sure everyone understands how the dataset works.
- Take some time to explore the visualization tool, in both map and graph mode. Talk through with your group: What does this dataset show? Can you detect any sort of hierarchical classification schema?
- Do you observe any trends that spark your curiosity? Note them down. Now think: why do you need to be extremely cautious about this observation?
- Did you find this tool useful at all? Why? No? Why not?
| Site | Country | Species | Technology | Age (ka) | Techniques | Reference |
|---|
How to cite this dataset
Please refer to the original publication for any scholarly research work. This tool is for teaching purposes only.
Paige, J. and Perreault, C. 2023. A Dataset Describing the Manufacturing of Stone Tools Over 3 Million Years. Journal of Open Archaeology Data, 11: 12, pp. 1–7. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/joad.114
What is in the dataset
Each of the 155 rows is one technology or one set of technologies described in a published report, not one artefact and not one site. Where a paper described several distinct reduction sequences, each was coded separately and a further row records everything present across the whole assemblage — those summary rows are marked Whole assemblage in the table.
- 145 archaeological entries, from 100 sites
- 5 non-human primate tool-making behaviours
- 5 technologies produced in controlled flintknapping experiments
- 33 procedural units coded present/absent in every entry
- Covers ~3.3 million years ago to the 19th century CE
- Technology, Country and Region were added for this page and are not the authors' coding
The 33 procedural units
Definitions are quoted from Table 1 of the paper.
Files in this repository
- Paige_Perreault_2023_DatasetManufacture.pdf — the published paper
- data/stone_tools.csv — the tidied dataset, one row per entry
- data/stone_tools.json — the same data plus the codebook, used by this page
- stone_tools.kml — all 145 mapped entries for Google Earth or QGIS