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I have looked at many point types from many regions and they hold the same time period the same flaking the same shape the same notching but called different
my question is why
My feeling is it s due to different archaeologists working in different geographical areas Finding things and wanting to be the guy who names the things they find ( ego).
Years ago they did not have internet and relied on snail mail so Jon doe in one area could be working on some point type unbekownst to his contemporary working on a type that is both age and culturally similar . Rather than wait and see what Jon Doe had to say the second guy or gal Jane doe maybe would make the decision to name it . That leaves us with similar points that are age and culturally similar named different things . Just my humble opinion.
In a nutshell, you are on it, Hoss,. People like labeling things. They really like putting their own label on them...I think that’s why we have what we have, for the most part.
Wandering wherever I can, mostly in Eastern Arkansas, always looking down.
Whatever the cause, it's what makes Noel Justice's typology books and cluster model so valuable, IMHO. By attempting to look past the regionalization of typology and by listing the analogs and correlates across regions.
And North American prehistoric archaeology did not develop with anything like a national nomenclature committee overseeing the type names to be assigned.
And I think in part it's because archaeology is actually still a young science, and we still are in the classification stage that is part of the early stage of a scientific discipline. We still have untyped points out there. We had an overarching dominant paradigm that, for many decades, had Clovis as the earliest point type, and it was difficult to even talk about earlier occupations without academic tenure to protect your job. We did not look for types older then Clovis. All these things are evidence of an understanding of our hemisphere's prehistory that is still early in its development. And we're still in that position. It's possible, if there were something like a centralized nomenclature committee overseeing the typing of points, there would be fewer regional names.
On the other hand, once you're in the Archaic era, regional styles did develop, and there is variation within a discreet type that reflects local uniqueness. Approaches like that of Justice help me to see that fact while understanding the broader similarities at the same time. Thus we have Otter Creek in the Northeast and Big Sandy further south. Different names, but both part of the Large Side Notch cluster as Justice describes it. I like that approach, as it allows me to relate my local and regional types to developments that are more then just local and regional, and help overcome the fact that our archaeology has been so much a function of regions, resulting in a proliferation of regional names for the same basic types.
I agree with the rest as to the reasoning of our current classification system...
As far as flaking goes my opinion is this: There's only a limited number of techniques and tool sets that can achieve successful creation of a flaked stone tool. Those techniques and tool sets were taught and learned by ancient man over thousands of years. Some ancient peoples excelled in the mastery of regional lithics coupled with the tool sets and the demands of the enviroments in wich they lived.
Knapping stone tools and ones proficiency in doing so is a combination of techniques learned, time spent perfecting those techniques and each individuals differing standards relating to what a successful flaked stone tool must look like and the task they must achieve.
Overlapping similarities in flaked tool forms and flaking patterns is an inevitable by product of the limited number of ways to achieve the reduction of raw lithic resources into functioning and successful tool forms.
Add to that the fact that knapping talent was different from one person to the next---some were Michelangelo and some were "Stick Man" knappers. Just like cursive signatures are different---each man's knapping was probably similarly different from another guys knapping.
I look at Ron he has master knapping maybe not everything but my god he is a person that can Knapp and with all thousands of years it would not be refined
Darn it .. yes pondering this thought .I will be looking in books after a find and in the South it’s called one thing the North another .
My biggest wonder is why did the style change . I am sure it has to do with so many people in the group and turning them out faster .
Then learning the aerodynamics of a type and trying something new . My 2 cents
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