Core Reduction and Mobility

I recently came across an interesting paper by Hertell & Tallavaara discussing the relationship between hunter-gatherer mobility and core technology during the Mesolithic.

The paper suggests that for mobile foragers the conical blade core reduction would have been the most efficient, offering the potential to produce a wide range of tool blanks. An irregular flake core on the other hand is a significantly less efficient way to turn raw stone into tool blanks and it has been suggested that this strategy is expected to have been employed with decreasing mobility, when there was less demand for core efficiency.

Early Mesolithic conical blade cores from Limburg (left) and Somerset (right). Intriguingly, whilst the core from Somerset is heavily patinated in Limburg intense patinas are only found on Palaeolithic tools.

After the post-glacial human dispersal to the north during the Early Mesolithic the hunter-gatherers in northern Europe in general had larger home ranges and were more mobile than their successors. This increased mobility requires efficient core reduction and during the Early Mesolithic a higher percentage of conical cores has been observed.

The percentage of irregular cores follows an inverse pattern when compared with the conical cores showing a clear increase from the Middle to the Late Mesolithic.

Top and side views of conical (left) narrow-face (middle) blade cores from Limburg and a irregular flake core from Somerset. The latter was also used as a hammerstone.

Although there is no clear trend in the use of narrow-face cores throughout the Mesolithic, there is a clear rise during the Middle Mesolithic.

Blade removal scars on a Mesolithic narrow-face core from Limburg.

It appears that Mesolithic foragers intentionally varied their core reduction strategies depending on the constraints posed by mobility. Whilst the conical blade core strategy correlates positively with indicators of high mobility, irregular flake core reduction was increasingly employed when a site was occupied for longer period of time.