 I'm introducing our speaker today, Felicia de Afegna. Felicia is my grad student here in Anthropology since 2016. Before that, she did her undergraduate degree at Salisbury University in Maryland. She works in the prehistory of Southwest Asia, particularly epipytolylithic. I guess it intinealylithic also, or just stemming. Now just epipytolylithic. And if you could have a focus on lithic analysis, analysis, or the Trumpian. And I guess she's working the field with Lisa, whom you all know. And she's going to talk to us today about work she's been conducting from a site in Jordan, where she's using a battery of techniques to help us better understand the production of lithics. Hi, good afternoon everyone. I'm Felicia. First, I wanted to start off with thanking the ARF and the Stahl Endowment for giving me a chance to be able to go out and collect some of this raw material and do some of these raw material surveys that we'll be talking about a little later on. Without that, I would not be able to do my experimental work and talk about skill level analysis. So I just really wanted to thank you guys for that first. But today I'm going to be presenting the progress of my research on identifying communities of practice through the transmission of knowledge at Harana 4. To do that, I'm looking at skill level analysis, I'm doing typo-technological analysis, and also refitting. So we're going to talk about those in just a second. Oh, it's just a pointer. Okay, great. Thank you. Sorry. There we go. All right. So to give you guys some background on Harana 4. So here's Harana 4. And Jordan's kind of this area here. Syria's up there. Harana 4 is right in the middle of the Azraq Basin and was a wetland during the Epipaleolithic, which is right at the transition between the Pleistocene and the Holocene. So this site was inhabited from 1900, sorry, 1900, 800 to 18,600 calibrated BP. So during this time, we've got hunters and gatherers who are using this site, using the wetlands, but also using the steppe resources as well. They're constructing hut structures from both wetland and steppe resources. They're hunting. They're taking advantage of all of these different little environments that are in that area, and taking advantage of the plenifold flint that they have in that particular region. Harana 4 is considered an aggregation site. And so one of the reasons why it's considered an aggregation site, there are many. One of those reasons why it's considered an aggregation site is really because the phenomenal amount of diversity that we have in microlythic technology. Most Epipaleolithic sites tend to only have one or a small handful of lithic or microliths present on the site, and Harana has a lot of them. And so this is one of the reasons why it's considered to be an aggregation site, but there's also, we have evidence that a lot of the flint that people are using on the site is coming from about 15 kilometers or within 15 kilometers of the site itself. And so we know that people are actually coming to the site and utilizing and mobilizing their knowledge there. And so this kind of helps support the idea of it being an aggregation site where people are coming and really using that knowledge and really kind of making their tools right there. Fortunately, a lot of flint napping is happening at Harana, so I have a lot of material to work with. It's sometimes a little overwhelming, but we're going to get through some of it today. I'm very excited to talk about this with you guys. The stratigraphy is really fine. It's very clear in most places. I mean, we do have problems with bioturbation and other things. But for the most part, the stratigraphy is really fantastic to the point where we can look at hut structures and talk about 19,000-year-old hut structures. We can talk about occupation surfaces and be able to identify very distinct surfaces and layers from each other. For my particular research, I've actually picked two occupation surfaces, one from the early epipaleolithic and one from the middle epipaleolithic. Then I have two caches coming from early epipaleolithic to lithic concentrations coming from the early epipaleolithic and an additional cache that hasn't been dated yet. But I did want to throw that one in because it is a very interesting cache to kind of compare to the other caches. Before we get too far into the actual lithics themselves, I wanted to delve into theory a little bit. I promise I'm not going to take too terribly long on the theory. But I did want to kind of give you guys a background to show you where I'm coming from when actually approaching the construction of these communities of practice. In order to understand skill level, it's really important actually when trying to understand traditions and the transmission of a tradition. If an individual produces a core that is different from most of the other core reductions in an area, it would be prudent for us to know that a person was in the process of learning as opposed to being a skillful flint napper and deciding and making these choices on how they're going to reduce a core. So using a different body of knowledge there at Harana. And so it would be one way for us to kind of tell the difference between different bodies of knowledge. So are we looking at somebody who just doesn't quite know what they're doing yet? Or are we looking at somebody who's very skilled and who's mobilizing their knowledge in a different way? So when it comes to the educational approach that I'm using, mainly I'm using Situated Learning, Channel Patoir, and Genetic Processes. And I'm going to talk a lot more about that in a second. But so Situated Learning is really looking at masters and novices kind of being interconnected in a very social way. So what we see is that masters are dependent on novices because they end up having to train the new generation of people in order to carry on a practice. Novices are dependent on masters in a way that they need to gain this new information. They need to be socialized and they need to get this technical knowledge. So they become interdependent on each other in order for practice to continue. But we also look at novices as kind of coming in with less social and technical knowledge. So starting in the peripheral area, in the Situated Learning kind of way. So there are kind of more peripheral members of these groups. And eventually, through more socialization and through more education, they become more central members of these groups and being able to engage in very different ways. Channel Patoir is basically a method at looking at technology. And so what we see is that producers end up creating these kind of mental templates that aren't stagnant. So these mental templates are something that people are following in order to understand and know what a process or how to do either making a pot or flint napping. And so what they're doing is they're mobilizing that knowledge in a very particular order. The reason why it's not stagnant is that there's problems arise. So if you have an inclusion or sometimes you just hit a rock wrong, they have to be able to troubleshoot and kind of be flexible in their approaches. You can't just memorize, first I have to do this and then I have to do that and then I have to do this. It has to be much more flexible than that. So Channel Patoir provides a very flexible and very, I think, a strong way for us to approach technology really. And then finally, genetic processes. So this is coming mostly from Vagatsky and SACs. And really the genetic processes approach as knowledge is being very fluid. It's culturally relevant and has a history. And so the Dr. SACs, who is one of my advisors, produced this really wonderful model of the way that knowledge and education changes through time and practice as well. And so basically the genetic processes are microgenesis, sociogenesis, and ontogenesis. And what we have are microgenetic processes are small changes that happen on the individual level. So this would be something like somebody taking a, somebody deciding that they like a particular type of stone for a hammer stone. And they continue to use that throughout their life and they maybe change for different types of hammer stones occasionally, but they have a preference and maybe they pass that preference onto somebody else. This, the microgenesis is something that happens on that individual level. Sociogenesis is something that occurs when you have multiple people talking to each other or interacting. So it can happen through observation, through training, through talking, through playing. And so basically what it's saying is that this social interaction is going to affect the way that somebody understands the process of, in this case, flint mapping. While ontogenesis is really the way that it changes, that knowledge changes through the entire lifespan of an individual. So basically it's saying that masters are going to engage with flint mapping in a very different way than they had as novices. They have a much more robust understanding. They have a very different way of understanding the stone tools than they did when they were younger novices. Basically I'm using a combination of these three approaches in order to understand those communities of practice. And pretty much I look at novices as, so as novices begin flint mapping, they gradually become more acquainted with the social rules and boundaries that guide a practice. So how to hold a core, where an ideal flint mapping space is, are you building a little shade shelter, the fact that you have to use a precursor in order to flint nap, these are all things that would be very easily observed as a child or as a young adult when you're around these communities that are flint napping. And they're all also ethnographically visible. We can see them in the ethnographic record that people are oftentimes seeing this behavior going on, maybe not engaging, but they're seeing it. These rules then get reinforced throughout their education. But again, they're not stagnant because students and the novices basically each engage in learning and act in their own way. So they internalize these rules. They internalize those social structures and everything and kind of engage with it in a different way. And then this engagement kind of allows for some of that microgenesis, allows for some of those small kind of stylistic or idiosyncratic changes. That we see through time. But we see that the masters also are kind of engaging in the same general practice. So although some individuals have these minor fluctuations and minor changes in their approach to this entire body of knowledge in general, overall there would be a pretty consistent approach. Everybody would agree that or most people would agree that you do this first and you do this second. And this is how you correct a particular type of error. Currently, I'm in the process of doing some of these refitting and trying to establish this Tana Batoir so we can actually tell the difference between these different communities of practice. And so today I don't have too terribly much data to show for you guys. Well, I do, but it's still in a very preliminary stage. So refitting is taking a little bit of time. But I'm going to show you guys as much as I've got today and it would be pretty exciting. All right. So to start off, we did. So this summer I went out with Dr. Teresa Barquette and she and I did some raw material survey around the site of Chirona 4. This is from Sanchez 2019. But also Christophe Delage did the research as well earlier on. And basically what we wanted to see was the quality of these Flint outcrops. And so they identified a number of little outcrops within five kilometers of the site and a lot more within 15 kilometers of the site. And we wanted to see what that quality was. And we also wanted to collect some because we were doing experimental work as well. So what we ended up finding in this research and this was the main part of my stall funding was spent on doing this particular research. But we went to just a couple of these sites here. So the ones in red were sites that we visited. And we ended up finding that most of them were not very good quality Flint, unfortunately. None of them were really workable in our understanding, both of us being Flint nappers. We weren't able to get anything that worked. It was mostly very grainy and sandstone-like. But we did find some really wonderful Flint cobbles that were coming out of the waddies nearby. So that was really wonderful to be able to check and kind of see some of these. We haven't seen any material that came out of those particular outcrops that matched the stuff that we've seen at Harana yet. But we're hoping to next year expand this out a little bit more and be able to see if we can find some of these nicer outcrops where they're finding their really fantastic Flint. While we were down at this one right there, I think by that point in time we'd been out for like 12 hours. And we were approached by a couple of Bedouin guys in a truck and they'd come up to us and they're asking, hey, what are you guys doing over here? Why are you hitting these rocks? And so with our limited Arabic, we tell them, hey, so we're actually looking for Flint. And they're like, no, no, you're in the wrong place for Flint. This is not a good place where you need to go. You need to go north and there's this spot. You follow the wadi and you'll find it. It'll be like you can't miss it. And we were like, yes, let's do that. Let's follow what they do. So we go over and we drive for like an hour, maybe it felt like. And so we get out to that particular site and we're very excited. And we found some really wonderful Flint. Really fantastic stuff to start brown breaks like glass. It's embedded in this really chalky matrix. Unfortunately, it was a quarrying site, so a modern quarrying site. And so, you know, we're interested in that, but we're interested in maybe going back to some of those outcrops. So we saw some outcrops in the distance back here. So we would like to explore that more and see if maybe those outcrops are related to that same location. Because basically like this was just really wonderful stuff and very similar to a lot of the material that we actually see in the middle epipaleolithic at Harana. So it's something that we want to explore a little further. So one of the ways that I'm looking at skill and then basically understanding skills in the past is doing experimental Flint napping. I've been collecting a number of course from masters and novices. Right now I only have nine course, but I have a number of people who are all contributing and who are going to bring in additional course for me to work with and look at. The course that people are doing experimental work with are restricted to cobbles that are similar to the ones that we have near Harana. So we're looking at these kind of very tabular, flat and small cobbles of Flint. Just to kind of help keep consistency within the reduction sequences. The Flint nappers themselves are only allowed to use hard hammer stones, abraders and protective gear. We don't have really much evidence supporting soft hammers or like billets and the use of those. So I'm restricting the Flint nappers to those particular tools in order to create their reduction sequences. And finally I've got a couple of undergraduates who are interested in helping me out this semester in producing some of those novice course. So I'm going to be able to increase that quite significantly with the data that I'm going to show you guys in a second. But on those reduction sequences, what I'm looking at really, I'm focusing on error correction because error correction is really something that you would learn from somebody else. And so what I would like to see is the way that novices are approaching error correction and the way that masters are approaching error correction and kind of seeing if they have different approaches to solving problems. Let's see, additionally I'm looking at platform damage. So here we've got a flake with a nice feathered termination. It's got an isolated platform up here. There's really not much damage going on. So this is kind of what you would expect to see from somebody who knows what they're doing. It's just kind of generally a skilled flake. And then platform damage would be something like these two. So I've got an example of crushing here and battering on this side. So you can see here this entire platform has just been completely destroyed by the novice. You can't see it very well in here, but there's these tiny little micro fractures and it's cracked all the way through and the platform is actually completely ground off. It's some pretty intense damage that happens here. And then this one I've got battering here. So you can see there's a couple of hinge terminations and then this platform, you can see there's one, two, three, four, five different terminations. These are both experimental. And so I know for a fact that I had trouble taking that one off. But I also know that the person who took this one off is having trouble as well. But so basically I'm looking at those two as kind of major errors that happen at the platform itself. And I'm trying to see if those might be indicative of skill level. I'm also looking at the damage that might happen from the removal of a flake. So when you take off a flake, there's, you know, if you have a feathered termination, you don't have any damage underneath. But if it's stepping or if it's hinging or shattering, it might be causing damage to the pieces underneath of it. So I'm going to be looking at the consistency of those problems within the different skill levels. So far from what I've found on the reductions that I've been working with, I find that battering is much more common amongst novices. So novices are here in the red and masters are in the blue. So battering much, much more common amongst novices. And it does make sense because a lot of people don't tend to really know how to set up platforms quite yet. Another, so crushing and double initiation don't seem to be indicative of skill level quite yet, but I'm planning on collecting a lot more data to be able to really come up with skill level categories. But we see that masters are able to pretty consistently produce flakes that have absolutely no damage on them. Looking over at the types of errors that people are actually creating, again, we have masters are outperforming novices and being able to take off flakes that don't cause damage. But we do see that novices significantly make a lot more hinging problems and a lot more angle correction problems. So pretty consistently, we see that novices create hinged terminations which affect, you know, removals that have to happen later. And then basically taking off flakes that change the angle of a core and make it so that you actually have to correct that angle again. So those are the two main problems that I'm seeing right now with novices themselves that I'm going to refine this a little bit more. I'm going to do a lot more statistical analysis once I get a lot more cores under analysis. I also wanted to explore the frequency of removals to see if the frequency of removals had anything to do with the actual skill level of a flint napper. Mostly I find that lateral core trimming is much more common amongst novices. I'm not quite sure why, and I think that it might have something to do with the fact that they're easy removals. And so I'll talk about that in a second. But we've got, what is it? Oh, so we've got initial core tablets and non-initial core tablets are a little bit more common in novices. But nothing really seems too terribly significant quite yet. What I do want to point out is that crested blades, partially crested blades and profile correction blades, oh, and core face rejuvenation are things that more commonly are produced by masters, and those are very tricky removals. They require a lot of skill, and they happen a lot later on in those core reduction sequences. So do find that interesting. Just kind of this breakdown. I want to look at these lateral core trimming elements a little bit more. So they are very common. And so I decided to look into them a little bit more. I've been collecting morphological data on all of the experimental pieces that have been coming off. So I'm looking at the proximal medial distal thicknesses, widths, looking at weights, so that way I can compare them. And unfortunately, I find that you can't really tell the difference between a skilled lateral core trimming flake and a non-skilled lateral core trimming flake. They're quite similar. I'm going to continue exploring this, but I think I might have to go more on frequency with this particular one. I was absolutely sure in my first year that I was going to be able to look at the lateral core trimming elements, and I don't think I'm going to be able to. Moving on to the refitting. I'm looking at concentrations, caches, and floors. So this is a floor from area A, the middle epipalea, the middle epipaleolithic area. This is a cache from area B, early epipaleolithic, and this is a concentration. You can kind of see it right there. The difference between the caches and the concentrations are the caches are actually dug into a surface while the concentrations tend to just be kind of, they were described by one excavator as a pile. So they're not actually dug in. They're just kind of scattered on the surface in this very tight constrained area. Just to kind of show you guys some spatial. So we've got area B is that middle epipalea, sorry, the early epipaleolithic site. Area A is the middle epipaleolithic, and then area E, where this little cache that we're going to talk about next is kind of right around here. I just wanted to give you guys some spatial orientation when it comes to the actual site itself. So this is area B, and right, you can see these gray areas here are hut structures, and we've got some rodent disturbance down here. But we have two caches that are associated with hut structure one. So this hut structure here. And so those are dated to around 19,200 to 18,800. We have an additional cache that's not really related to either stratigraphy-wise. They're related, and I'm not sure exactly how this one fits into the entire sequence quite yet, but it's definitely between the occupation layer and those hut structures. We have some concentrations coming from in between this area here, and then another cache coming from area E. So I just wanted to pull, this is one of the caches that I've looked at. And you can see it's this very fine material. Unfortunately, you can't see it in these photos, but there's three refits here. There's two here, two here, two here, two here. So there's a number of refits that happen in between these, but notice there's no cores. We have one microlith across the bottom here. There's really no major tools or anything that are being utilized, and there's no evidence of retouch outside of that one single microlith. So we get a lot of corrective and maintenance pieces and a lot of blades, but nothing too much outside of that in general. Here's another cache. So this actually is coming from this cache here. And what we're seeing are more lateral core trimming, kind of secondary flakes, and another lateral core trimming that I think these are like seven, four, and three different flakes that are fitting back together here. Again, there are these kind of patterns that seem to be coming out. I only have a couple of caches, so I don't want to say like patterns in a very strong sense, but I do want to just kind of note that the caches kind of tend to follow these selective choices. So what am I seeing in the patterns? So these two are those caches that I was telling you about, and then these two are concentrations, and this is a cache from that area E that we haven't quite dated. And the reason why I left it in here is because you see there's really not that much late phase, which is quite different from these that are all from the early epipaleolithic. So we see that the caches have almost no early phase removals. They have a lot of intermediate phase and a lot of late phase, but they don't have any larger tool types. The only type of tool that we see are these microliths that show up in them. And then we have a dominant material type. The vast majority of these caches are coming from one particular core. The materials identical across all of these pieces, and so we see that cache two has the most of this non-dominant material, but pretty much everywhere else, almost all of the pieces that fit within these caches are coming from one dominant material type. The analysis that I've done so far shows that blades, flakes, and lateral core trimming elements were most frequently cached. Other corrective and maintenance pieces were also cached like platform isolation, profile correction blades, and partially ridged blades. They're not as common as the other ones, but they are pretty common, at least in caches one and two, and they're less common in the concentrations. Another thing that I noticed was that the concentrations don't have any chips. So these very, very small removals that are kind of waste products of the whole flint mapping process. The caches one and two both have chips, and then concentrations three and four do not have any chips at all. So that might be just tephonomy. It could be that they're choosing that. I'm going to investigate that a little bit more, but I don't have too much terribly more to say on that particular thing. I just thought it was quite interesting. And then again, the only tools that we're finding caches are non-geometric microliths. Now to switch over to the occupation surfaces. I'm looking at two different occupation surfaces, so one from the early epipaleolithic, which is this one, and then one from the middle epipaleolithic, which we're going to look at next. So this occupation surface, 043, extends pretty far, and I have some evidence that it may be extend down to here, but I haven't been able to find the map on that quite yet, but I'm going to work on that. And so what you can, oh, you can't see it, but we have 043 is right here, and the layer above it, I was lucky enough to find the carbon date on those layers, and was able to date that particular layer, or the layer above it to 19,400 to 18,915. And so that comes from the Maharat all paper. And then underneath of it, we know that the hut structures, so which are only one, two, I think three layers underneath of that, are dating to the 19,200 to 18,800. This particular surface is very compact. The artifacts are at random orientation. We have ochre. There's ochre, animal bone, and lithics that are very present within this particular occupation layer. And the most of my focus has been on this area here. What I've seen is that the AY73, this middle square has the highest density out of all of the other areas that I've had a chance to look at. It also has the most corrective pieces out of all the areas that I've looked at. The density drops off significantly as you go west, and it drops off a little bit as you go east. And I haven't had a chance to check south or north yet, but those are definitely next on my list, and I'm going to expand out as far as I can get in this particular surface itself. Let's see here. So far I've got, from these three squares, I have 47 cores from one layer. So if it tells you anything about density, I've got over 10,000 pieces of debitage from that one square alone. So the density is really, really thick in these layers that I have a lot to work with when looking at the refits. So I'm going to show you guys some of those refits. So these are the refits that are coming together from this particular area right here. So this is the typo-technological analysis. This is going into looking at the patterns and colors in order to separate out which particular materials are related to each other, so which might be going back together to those same cores. And then these are just kind of the final stages where they're just kind of sitting in holding patterns until we have a chance to actually go through and try to refit them in the lab. And basically refitting, you just start from the inner side and you kind of start from the inside and you start from the outside and you try to make matches back and forth until you can get the whole thing back together. It's like a crazy 3D puzzle. It's very, it's a lot of fun, I have to say, but it's challenging. Let's see here. Yeah, three squares, excellent. The next occupation service that I'm looking at is from the Middle Epipaleolithic area. And so this dates to about 18,800 to 18,600. And what we see, we've got these two squares, so AT37 and AS37. I've been looking at these two squares and basically all of the information I've pulled is from AS37. It's quite fascinating. AS37 has over 6,500 pieces of debatage and AT37 has less than 100. They're also extremely kind of burnt and battered up here. So I'm interested in investigating why that density change is so significant. But I'm also planning on spreading out further. As you can see, this is about six meters long and about four meters wide and it's the biggest extent that we know of so far. So I'd be, I'm very interested in getting some more of the spatial data because what I'm seeing, so these are two of the cores that I'm refitting from AS37 and these are those cores in progress. But so what I'm seeing in AS37 and particularly in this core in general is a large number of what Flintnapper, like as a Flintnapper, what Flintnappers would see as errors. So there's a lot of angles that are coming off in the wrong way or things are hinging or things are stepping. So I'm seeing a lot of stuff that kind of looks like it might be somebody who's less skilled doing it. I'm not sure about that yet, but I want to investigate that a lot more. And so I think with some of these really nice removals and some of these cores that I've been looking at that look like they have a pretty significant amount of skill. Again, I'm not quite sure yet. I need to finish up that experimental work that I've been working on. But I'm very interested to see how these skill levels play out across this floor. I think there's some real potential there for understanding the ways that people were situating themselves while they were Flintmapping. So if we've got like one master sitting next to a novice or if we've got a master and two novices are sitting six meters away, I'm not quite sure yet and I'm really interested in investigating that further. So what we see in the floors in general, so far from the type of technological analysis and some of the refitting that I've been able to do is that we see that a Y73 had the most amount of debitage. It's a little deceiving here because this indeterminate and non-diagnostic flakes I removed because with them you couldn't see these initial flakes. So I just wanted to bring that to your attention. But we see across all of them that those initial flake removals are actually not as common as the middle or the later ones. So that's just kind of a pattern that I'm seeing as we're going along. But we do see that there's a pretty good amount of initial reduction showing up in these places that have higher densities. So I'm interested in understanding why they're using particular spaces more frequently than others. Also we see that tools and debitage are actually, they're not making up a huge percentage of the amount of debitage and lithics that we have on site. But what we do see is that the tools that we have on these occupation surfaces are much more diverse than the tools that we were getting in caches. So what we're seeing in these occupation surfaces are things like scrapers and bearings, but also notched tools, denticulated tools, and just this wide variety of utilized and retouched pieces in various forms. Finally, I wanted to talk to you guys about 3D modeling and why you would do it. So I've got some older setups that I've got here. 3D modeling on small elements, on small artifacts is really tricky and it took us about six months to kind of perfect a workflow that ended up being quite successful. And so we've got two unsuccessful workflows up here just to show you guys some of the stuff that we were trying to figure it out. But fortunately we got it figured out and we've got some cores that are finally coming along. But the reason why I think refitting and 3D modeling is a really good pairing for understanding the actual reduction sequences and the transmission of knowledge is because when you're refitting you glue those pieces back together, right? So you're gluing flakes on top of blades and you end up losing the spatial relationships between pieces because you might have a 2D photo of it or you might be able to describe it, but it's just not as good as being able to actually look at those spatial relationships. So I'm going to pull up a model that I've got here for you guys. So basically what I'm doing is creating these sequences of... What's it? I'm just creating sequences of these cores, right? So I'm having an initial phase, middle phases and final phases of these core reductions. Is there a way to switch this over? Does anybody know? Yeah, it's on my screen, yeah. Excellent, thank you. Awesome, thank you so much. Okay, alright. So these core reduction sequences, there's a lot... Sorry, it's not... Okay, so what we can actually see, you can even see right here the number of flakes that they're kind of taking off. We see that there's a space that people are actually using to prepare these surfaces before they're taking off some of these major corrective pieces. We can also see across the side here that there's blades missing and so not only can we talk about the tools that might be walking away from these cores, but we can also talk about different methods that people are using to correct these shapes. I'm sorry, I can't see it on my computer so this is trying to do it backwards. But so we can see there's a hole right in here where you can see somebody hinged this removal and so they tried a couple of times and were not quite successful or maybe they were trying to stop it there. But so we can see a lot of detail and go back through in order to understand the entire sequence and be able to compare them and since I'm taking all of these, I'm taking all of the measurements from each of these removals, I'm going back through and actually doing basically running statistics on them to see how similar they are to each other, to see how different they are from each other so that way I can kind of go back and maybe match some of these reduction sequences through those 3D cores and compare their similarities and differences that way. I also think that it's I think that it's also really useful these 3D models for understanding use of space and doing use of space research so because I'm interested in seeing how masters and novices are situating themselves in these actual flint-napping events I've also been working on doing 3D models over excavation spaces so I've done one on HUT Structure 2 that we excavated in 2018 but also on a combustion feature that we worked on this summer so I was very happy to be able to be offered the chance to work on that and be able to actually make that model for them and now it's not working, I'm sorry guys I was really happy to show that one off to you we'll see if it comes back around but so yeah so I'm looking, ah there we go, there we go I'm not going to fiddle with it from here though so we'll just deal with this as a 2D but so what we can see we've got scrapers and stone tools and we have this huge combustion feature with all these different things going on and I think that it's very useful for going back and trying to understand how these spaces were actually situated and how people were choosing to place themselves and I think that being able to go back and look at something in 3D is going to be incredibly helpful for understanding this use of space I'm scared yeah I don't think it's yeah I figured that was going to happen okay maybe the HUT structure will listen to me I ran these all this morning and they were working so we'll see, okay well I can switch over and see if you guys have okay there we go so here's one of the HUT structures I have it on the side right now so you can kind of see that bowl shape of the HUT structure itself but one of the things that's really useful is to be, come on that was really delayed but you can actually go in and zoom in onto these and see so we've got a flint cobble down here I think that was a mandible or something over there but when you actually have it situated in a way that you can see it you can actually see those stone tools and you can kind of understand the spatial relationships a little bit more but also in context with other things so we can look at these post hole features or we can look and talk about this rodent disturbance and kind of help make our interpretations off of that but yeah so I think 3D modeling is very very beneficial when looking at use of space and trying to understand the way that people were situating themselves in the past okay well so that's all I've got for you guys today thank you so much it was an absolute pleasure those are the works I've cited and these are the people I'd really like to thank for all of their help with getting this work together thank you any questions? first question is it's just you said that you went to this quarry site that your Bedouin relation friends told you about and you said oh it was unfortunate because it was a quarry site I would have thought that would be good can you explain a bit more what you mean why that was bad? absolutely so for us it was really great because we had really easy access to these wonderful pieces of flint the reason why we were looking for natural outcrops that would be something that somebody in the epipaleolithic might have had more access to so that's the reason why it was unfortunate it wasn't a natural outcrop no yeah it was incredibly disturbed yeah sorry it was a modern quarry site yeah well it's definitely yeah can you determine what parts of the flint outcrop it's gone yeah so while the flint is all there there's basically all you see is these like backhoe sort of removals and bulldozers that are just pushing stuff to the side so we don't really have a way to look at it as a natural outcrop great novice material are they just off in a room on their own or are you doing kind of a learning process? yeah that's a great question so I've been very concerned about the effect of my teaching on these particular students so basically what I've been doing is teaching them so I've been teaching them the basics of how to take off a flake like so you hit a flake and this is what you do and then I show them the reduction sequences and then are like okay so try this you know and get them to try it I do have a number of my initial reduction sequences are from when I first started flint napping and so it was like me just trying to figure out how these cores were going so I didn't really have much of an influence on those but moving forward I also have other experiments planned to see how much variation it causes to have like a particular influence of one flint napper teaching you know a group of people so it is something that I'm concerned about and I recognize that just kind of letting people have at it might not be the best way at approaching the actual reduction sequences themselves so I'm also trying to spread out and I have a Teresa Barquette actually is giving me some of the reduction sequences that her students are making so that way we can have like a comparative and be able to see how much influence a particular flint napper has over their students as well that answer yeah okay yeah yeah so yes so currently I have one master who is making my flint napping that's going to be extended out to I think a total of seven and it's a really slow process of like getting it all together but it's going to be extended out to about seven total flint nappers who are masters and I think a total of 12 or 11 sequences oh great here or in Jordan or in the world yeah so most of them are in California but I do have a novice flint napper in Jordan one of the Ahmed so he worked with us this summer and did a little bit of the survey with us as well and he's been working on flint napping hmm still for the core reduction sequences I'm like I've got like middle people as well like so I'm putting myself in the middle yeah yeah I'm putting myself pretty heavily in the middle when it comes to blade reductions but so I've got I'm kind of I've got this spread because you know skill level isn't necessarily a very solid thing so I've got a spread from people who are brand new and who've never touched a piece of flint before and then it kind of gradates into people who are very highly skilled and capable of doing this so I think very very roughly I have like a middle point where I'm putting people as like novices and masters but I'm keeping track of which cores they're producing so that way I can kind of get a more fine-scaled understanding of skill level material so what I've got I'm going to be doing bad material and good material across across all of the groups and so it'll all be flint it's all coming from tabular pieces very similar in size and shape to the ones that we have at Harana 4 and yeah so that's that's what I'm doing to try to account for for the raw material variation yeah so yeah yeah so I spent a couple hundred dollars trying to bring a hundred pounds of flint back to the United States this summer and only received 50 pounds of it and it took three additional hours at the airport to get through security so I'm not planning on doing that again but I have found some really good sources in the United States particularly in tennis and Texas and Tennessee that have really very similar cores and very similar material to what we have in Jordan yeah yeah so they've done some research there's been some experimental research done where they look at the where they look at how much the actual raw material affects the flint nappers and they do find that really terrible material really bad and difficult material to work with does affect the way that flint nappers approach it and those that's looking at specifically masters who are approaching it that way and then kind of those medium and finer quality materials don't really affect the approaches that flint nappers have to take so it's not necessarily it doesn't really affect the like the flint nappers like skill in a way it's more of like the approach they have to change their approach to the material because it's lower quality so they kind of have to adjust for that but yeah so the flint quality does affect it and that's pretty much what we're doing is we're going out to quarrying sites and trying to find cobbles that look these particular sizes and usually less than the thickness of your thumb and just kind of going for cobbles that are about that big and that's mainly just trying to keep it as consistent as possible but the country of origin yeah so it's interesting there are a lot of chips in that chicken curry and that cash and other things was it maybe a dump site or workshop that's what I'm trying to figure out is why would you cash chips and why would you cash some of these corrective and maintenance pieces I'm not quite sure yet and it doesn't seem like they're depositing all of their debitage right there's not really any initial removals that are there there's no pores, there's no setting up and changing of angles so I think that the pieces that are in those caches are being selected or they could be just kind of gathered up and put together but I don't really have an answer on that one besides that I think that people are choosing what's going in those caches that are much lower then whereas our mid-small little packet of nothing but flints including often pores and the chips and the small flay lids less of the cortical pieces versus the mids that are material so they've been in a little bubble and it's possible if I could have another example that I think I've presented here previously of two cores that were found side by side and neither of which are exhausted yet that were wrapped what we interpret as wrapped around a fox held bag so we still have the articulated fox paws around the cores so it's possible that they were also held in some kind of leather pouch or something that's just decayed with which would explain why they're perfect little packets there's that one really great photo there's going to be something very different about the intentionality and the appearance of their deposition compared to oh no, it's just gone too far there we go so this one's like you can really really clearly see like the circle around it this is a bone tool right there right on top of that entire set and so there's a little core and then that's just all debitage around there and a couple little fragments of bone so these are very so these are yeah any other questions thank you