@article{16fa065c39d04e64bebba469302e5859,
title = "Abundant blade segments at Shuidonggou, Locality 1: Intentional or accidental?",
abstract = "Blades in the Initial Upper Paleolithic assemblages from Shuidonggou, Locality 1 (SDG1) are frequently fragmented. Complete blades are rare and proximal, medial and distal blade segments are abundant in the collections from various excavation campaigns at the site. Using a large sample of artifacts from 1963 excavations at the SDG 1 site, this paper evaluates the hypothesis that blades were intentionally broken into regular sections, perhaps to facilitate their insertion into armatures of composite tools. The scarcity of traces of percussion and hafting-related modification, and the non-standardized lengths of segments do not suggest intentional human intervention in sectioning the blades. Instead, the strong correlation between segment length and a measure of blade strength suggests that most if not all blade sections resulted from accidental breakage.",
keywords = "Blade technology, Composite tools, Hafting, Initial Upper Paleolithic",
author = "Kuhn, {Steven L.} and Feng Li",
note = "Funding Information: We thank Profs. Xing Gao, and Fuyou Chen (IVPP, Beijing) for providing us with access to the 1963 collection of SDG1. S.K. thanks the Chinese Academy of Sciences President's International Fellowship Initiative (Grant No. 2015VEA013 ), and F.L. thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a postdoctoral stipend and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS ( 2017102 ) facilitating this study. This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41672024 and 41502022 ). The comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal were very helpful in improving the paper. Dr. Arina Khatsenovich generously shared with us references on intentional breakage of lithic blanks in other contexts. Funding Information: We thank Profs. Xing Gao, and Fuyou Chen (IVPP, Beijing) for providing us with access to the 1963 collection of SDG1. S.K. thanks the Chinese Academy of Sciences President's International Fellowship Initiative (Grant No. 2015VEA013), and F.L. thanks the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for a postdoctoral stipend and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2017102) facilitating this study. This work has been supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 41672024 and 41502022). The comments of two anonymous reviewers and the editors of this journal were very helpful in improving the paper. Dr. Arina Khatsenovich generously shared with us references on intentional breakage of lithic blanks in other contexts. Publisher Copyright: {\textcopyright} 2018 Elsevier Ltd Copyright: Copyright 2019 Elsevier B.V., All rights reserved.",
year = "2019",
month = mar,
doi = "10.1016/j.ara.2018.02.003",
language = "English (US)",
volume = "17",
pages = "62--69",
journal = "Archaeological Research in Asia",
issn = "2352-2267",
publisher = "Elsevier BV",
}