Digital Technologies, Acheulean Handaxes and the Social Landscapes of the Lower Palaeolithic

Handaxes are the definitive stone tool of the Lower Palaeolithic (Old Stone Age), and remain our best and most abundant evidence for human sociality, cognition and behaviour in the deep past (~1.75 million to 300,000 years ago).

Britain has a vast corpus of handaxes, and they are uniquely well dated. As people left Britain during successive ice ages, our human occupation forms a discontinuous series of pulses during warm interglacials, and handaxes can be assigned to specific pulses. This project aims to use our handaxes, fitted into this uniquely refined chronology, to address two fundamental questions:

1) do different configurations of Acheulean handaxe shapes reflect different early Neanderthal (aka Homo heidelbergensis) populations in Britain and Europe between ~600,000 and 250,000 years ago; and 2) to what extent were these populations using this material culture to signal their individual and group identities?

Interpreting the significance of handaxe variation depends upon three key factors - robust dating, understanding the patterning of variation, and appreciating the causes of variation. The past 40 years has seen an increasingly rigorous scientific approach to all these factors: the development of new multi-proxy chronological frameworks (tied to the global Marine Isotope Stage record) that provides millennial or even centennial timescales; and a more accurate quantification of both stone tool morphology and the factors which influence it. The developments in dating have allowed members of this research team to identify, for the first time, cogent spatial and temporal patterns in the British Lower Palaeolithic artefact record. We have shown that each interglacial has its own unique artefact signature, measured in terms of handaxe presence/absence, the range of distinctive handaxe forms, and the presence/absence of more complex technology. We have linked this to climatically driven phases of colonisation and residence during warm interglacials, and abandonment during cold glacials, occurring in tandem with changes in sea level that transformed the geographical and social relationship between Britain and the rest of Europe. Many of the distinctive handaxe forms required high levels of skill to produce, and involved a high risk of failure, so have further interpreted handaxes as being meaningfully related to the norms of the social groups that made them. Yet up until now, the methods used to define and model patterns of handaxe morphology and technology have remained rooted in the 1960s work of Derek Roe, and are increasingly out of step with the digital world.

To answer our research aims, this project will:
1) Produce a definitive digital database of handaxe assemblages using state-of-the-art structured light 3D scanning technologies. Then conduct newly developed 3D methods of analyses, in order to:
2) Establish a new and more precise synthesis of spatio-temporal handaxe variation in the British Lower Palaeolithic.
3) Quantify the role of rock type and form, knapping techniques, knapping skill, reduction intensity, function, landscape context, and design on this variation.
4) Provide a new framework for 21st-century Palaeolithic research drawing on psychological models for how group level behaviours emerge and exploring the roles such behaviours may have played in the Lower Palaeolithic hominin niche.
5) Reduce the carbon footprint of stone tool analysis while expanding travel-free accessibility, by providing a database of high resolution handaxe scans.