<< Previous Chapter: Overview
Chapter 2: Middle Paleolithic Stone Tool Industries
Page: 1 2
One of the most common types of cultural materials found at Middle Paleolithic sites are stone artifacts. This is because stone is a durable material that preserves well over time, unlike most organic materials such as wood, animal hides, plant foods, and so forth, which quickly disintegrate. Stone artifacts are thus one of the most important lines of evidence we have about cultural behavior in the remote past. One of the first goals that archaeologists have when working with stone artifacts is to classify them into categories that are based on a set of descriptions that are shared by other archaeologists. For Middle Paleolithic stone artifact assemblages, particularly those from Western Eurasia, this set of descriptions (known more formally as a typology) was formalized by the French prehistorian, François Bordes. (1)
The Bordian typology for the Middle Paleolithic is widely used by archaeologists in Europe and the Middle East. It identifies 63 different types of stone tools. Some of these are the products of a specialized technology called Levallois, 
which is a way of preparing a stone nodule so that a specific, shaped removal can be made.
Next Chapter: Mousterian Assemblage Variability >>
• 1. Overview
• 2. Middle Paleolithic Stone Tool Industries
• 3. Mousterian Assemblage Variability
• 4. Site Formation
• 5. Establishing Chronology
• 6. Interpreting Spatial Data
Stone Artifacts
Pieces of stone that have been culturally manufactured during flintknapping. They include all types of stone tools, such as scrapers and denticulates, and all the removals from a core, such as flakes and blades, as well as the products of resharpening stone tools, such as tiny flakes, and manufacturing debris, such as shatter.