Fitting Prehistoric Stone Knives

Prehistoric stone knappers manufactured stone tools (lithics) from blocks of raw material by striking off flakes and blades (blanks) from them. It is of considerable interest in archaeology to identify those blanks that have been struck from the same core, and to fit the flakes together. This task is known as lithic refitting or conjoining. Currently, lithic refitting is performed manually, through visual inspection and physical comparison, and is extremely time consuming. Because refitting requires each pair of potentially conjoining pieces to be manually compared, the time requirements rise geometrically with the size of the assemblage. Some researchers do not even attempt refitting studies with large assemblages. In addition, potential refits are often also limited to a single site or even a single layer, although inter-site refitting programs would be of a high archaeological value for what they could tell us about social contacts, mobility, and contemporaneity of occupations.

This project aims at developing a computer system to help archaeologists to digitally archive data from lithic artifacts, and to provide various refitting functions such as automatically searching for conjoining blanks in a large data base of artifacts. An automated refitting process would not only make conjoining widely available as a tool to study the remote past, but would also open up new avenues for research. Potential refits between artifacts from sites stored at different localities, or simply inaccessible due to regulations of various antiquities departments throughout the world, can be identified and evaluated in the computer, making conjoining of artifacts from different sites a serious possibility.