| Flaked-stone artifacts play an important role in the human adaptation process and are used in a wide range of activities. The series of activities involved in making and using flaked-stone tools, which include finding suitable materials, applying efficient techniques to break those materials, forming them into tools, and maintaining these tools until discarding, are known as technological organization.;One emphasis in flaked-stone analyses during the last two decades has been on understanding technological organizations and the factors that may have contributed to the variations in technological organizations. These factors are argued to be specific individual factors, such as mobility patterns, or a combination of these factors specific to local contexts. Unfortunately, due to the lack of sufficient models incorporating all environmental and cultural aspects that may have played a role in technological organization, lithic research focuses currently on examining independently each of the factors that possibly contributed to human behavior associated with lithic production and use. As a contribution to the understanding of these factors, this research focused on the importance of one of these factors, the availability and nature of raw materials, in determining technological organization. Flaked-stone assemblages from SNI-39 on San Nicolas Island and SCLI-43 on San Clemente Island were analyzed to test the role of the accessibility and the nature of materials in determining technological organization.;This research demonstrated that easy access to locally available materials contributed to the technological organization of the flaked-stone artifacts in the Channel Islands during the Holocene. The occupants of both sites relied on locally available materials for flaked-stone production and developed efficient techniques to reduce them, partially depending on the initial cobble forms. The abundance of and easy access to rocks allowed the occupants to use locally available materials with a non-conservative behavior. On the other hand, artifacts made of non-local materials represent a more conservative behavior. Therefore, expedient behavior is associated with locally available materials and curated behavior is associated with non-local materials. |
