The Origins of Recycling: A Paleolithic Perspective
Research Workshop of the Israel Science Foundation
Our major objective is to study aspects of flint recycling and bone reusing in Paleolithic sites from the Old World. More specifically, our goals include:
1. Define, characterize and identify the different components within the lithic and faunal Paleolithic assemblages that bear evidence of recycling and reusing.
2. Reconstruct the technological procedures involved and describe in detail the specific Chaîne Opératoire of the different categories of recycling and reusing.
3. Explore the meaning and significance of lithic recycling and bone reusing during the Paleolithic, the reasons for and the behavioral implications of these procedures. Possible routes of inquiry may include: a. Aspects of raw material availability and exploitation, and conceptions of using the natural resources; b. The nature of activities carried out in the sites; c. The nature of the sites as caves or open air sites and the duration of use by hominins. Other avenues of reasoning may arise from our search in the ethnographic literature or following our study of the recycled and reused items from the different sites.
Our major goals
The first session will be concentrated on the presentation of new data regarding lithic and bone/ivory recycling in the Paleolithic. This section will present case-studies and site-specific analyses of recent studies of recycling that have not been published (were not published previously). The section will allow a detailed discussion on the nature and definition of the recycling phenomenon in the Paleolithic. The second session will present a wider perspective and will incorporate the issues of artifacts life-history and resharpening to enable a broader outlook on the extension of the use-potential of lithic artefacts, with a detailed study of Paleolithic scrapers to be presented by different scholars in different views. The final session will deal with the meaning and significance of Paleolithic recycling, combining temporal, functional, anthropological and regional perspectives in order to allow a better understanding of this phenomenon. In this section explanations for recycling will be proposed, based on specific case-studies and use-wear analyses, enabling a wider behavioral and functional perspective of recycling in the Paleolithic.
