An Experimental Study Of The Use-wear On Hornfel Lithics

Since the 1960s,because of the rise of new archaeology that archaeologists began to pay close attention to the information behind the archaeological materials,they need "middle range theory" as a bridge between the static and dynamic history,and in the study of paleolithic,use wear analysis is such a kind of important research methods.Hornfels is a kind of important raw material that most appear in the fenhe basin,in order to better understand the ancient human behavior model and way of living,we choose 27 pieces of modern experiment specimens and put them into 14 groups to do this experiment.Different hardness of materials were chosen,involving fresh beef,fresh beef tendon,fresh pine,dry pine,fresh cow bone and dry cow bone,and the motion included cutting,scraping,sawing,chopping,drilling.This experiment demonstrates that different working motions and worked materials can produce different use-wear,combine the low power and high power we concluded that:1)Processing soft animal material:mainly appear light rounding and clear striations;2)Processing medium softer animal material:began to appear a few scars size around 383um;3)Processing medium wooden material:the number of the scars are increasing,and running-together,the roll-over scars occurring when saw the wooden material,the scars size in 791-2893um,with light polish on the edge;4)Processing medium hader wooden material:the roll-over scars also appear,and the scars are lager than working on fresh wood,size in 1171-4772um;5)Processing medium hard animal material:the scars size in 862-6736um,the edge rounding is heavy,with polish and striations that are parallel to the edge;6)Processing the hard animal material:most scars appear on working hard animal material,and the size are range from 1036 to 4039.The post-depositional processes experiment confirm that the post-depositional wear distribute randomly,can appear all around the lithic,this is different from the use wear,because the use wear always regularly occur on the used edge or the used faces.In front of use wear analysis,researchers can make the assessment about the lithic burial condition,excluded the serious burial process,than improve the accuracy of the analysis.