 In introduction, I added both my Italian collaborator Fabio Negrino and my PhD student Jean-Vierre Potsy-Bouchard as co-authors to this paper because as you'll see, a lot of the insights that we've been able to glean from the approach that we've developed to looking at the lithics at Riparo-Bombrini and other sites in Liguria, have been the result of a very collaborative kind of framework that we've developed over the years. And it kind of, in short, basically the title Making It Work encapsulates what we've been able to find here and that it is absolutely possible and productive to bridge different approaches but there are some challenges that come up when you try to do this. Some challenges come with ideas that when you approach archaeology as a practice and lithic analysis in particular, you may be confronted with Old World versus New World paradigms and this could be sort of glossed over as the North American versus European tradition but I think that from the sort of heated discussions about paradigms and different perspectives across different parts of the world, we've kind of come to a perspective now that's encapsulated in some of the papers that I'll talk about in a minute where there's actually more of an effort to actively bridge these differences. Not everybody is necessarily on board, there are some papers that have sought to trigger, I guess, some more active or explicit discussion of these issues. This paper by Mike Schott that came out in 2003 was very explicitly combative in terms of confronting the reduction sequence method that is more involved in North America to the Shenmuepe et al. approach which is more in bulk in Europe and I think that in some ways the style of this essay was part of why it hasn't generated quite as much discussion as it may well or shouldn't maybe have over time and in fact this is one of the elements that Tostovay raised in his discussions in his 2011 paper that to his knowledge in 2011 there hadn't been any kind of explicit response from European scholars to the charges of Mike Schott and there was sort of a question mark as to why what was what why the case what why what why that was the case and this paper marks an interesting inflection point I think in the evolution of how we think about some of these contacts across traditions in that it was very explicitly focused on trying to find common language, find common terminology, find theoretical middle ground for people to productively work across traditions and combine the best elements of North American versus European approaches and the question that Tostovay raised about the challenges raised by Schott was somewhat addressed in two recent papers by Yoduz and Carlay and by Catherine Perlès who basically confirmed what Tostovay said they didn't really talk about Schott's attacks I guess except to note in Yoduz and Carlay's paper that Schott brought to their attention an interesting case of refitting in the early in the late 19th century which had previously escaped the attention of the majority of French scholars but by and large I think that combative style that was used in some of the work of Schott and other people was not necessarily conducive to dialogue and kind of like the fact that a lot of people are collaborating across research traditions and arriving to really interesting ways of doing productive and groundbreaking work in understanding how people in the past actually lived as filtered through their lithic result. Now another thing that comes out of a close reading of some of these papers is that there are still some traditional differences I guess between the two approaches with the Cheneau-Pératois approach writ large still being somewhat uncomfortable with elements of quantification or overt explicit efforts to quantify everything which is fairly dominant in a lot of North American approaches and the notion of optimization which still undergirds a lot of the thinking about how lithics were used in North American traditions still creates a little bit of discomfort and that's okay I think a little bit of discomfort is not necessarily a bad thing but it's important to not let it be a paralyzing force. Now one of the things that's really great about the Cheneau-Pératois approach though is that it does emphasize case by case variability in the lithic record. There are some norms that seem to be agreed upon in terms of how people will make lithics but there are a lot of contingent factors that will play into how this actually plays out and this is what a Cheneau-Pératois approach focused on lithics and focused especially on stages production will be able to yield. There are some dimensions linked to the organization of technology in the sense of what Peggy Nelson called it in 1991 that still are not easily reconciled with some of the tennis of the Cheneau-Pératois and this is sort of what I'm going to be focusing on today because I think that there's actually quite a bit of overlap here that can be that can be productively recruited to develop a finer grain understanding of how people lived in the past and so when I started working in Italy a number of years now the main perspective was still heavily dominated by typology not only typology but the Laplace typology which has its own sort of bugaboos associated with it but it had been changing but people were still explicitly focusing on issues of the shape and the production of lithics as opposed to necessarily focusing more on how these lithics reflected adaptations to changing contexts and climates and territories. There were however a lot of techno-economic interests that were explicit in how people were trying to understand raw material procurement, raw material usage across sites and across territories and there were also efforts at integrating elements of reduction sequences, life use, life history, reduction intensity such as a fairly classic paper in Italy anyway on the endscrapper reduction from Rotaro Manelli that Amicare Bietti had written in 2003 and I think that Amicare Bietti who passed away much too soon was really a very important door that was opened onto the Italian world in order to foster some collaboration with North American perspectives. We're going to think already of people like Steve Kuhn and Stefano DiMaldi in the 90s but more recently people like Jesus Pina Poice, my collaborator Fabio Negrino, myself, different people like that and so the Bietti school I think was especially important in Italy to allow people to collaborate in different perspectives and so I'm going to give one fairly detailed example of how we've managed to do this in the site of Riparo Bambrini which is located in the Balzerosi here. There's a number of other sites where we're working or our team is working across the Guria and I'm happy to talk about them individually with you later on if you want to do so. I wanted to talk about that in the candidate but I didn't have enough time to squeeze it into this presentation so I apologize for shifting away from what the abstract had promised but it's still good so just bear with me. So this is what the Balzerosi look like. It's a cliffside here dotted with caves. On one side of this railway you've got Riparo Mocchi. On the other side of the railway you've got Riparo Bambrini. You can see it was probably still just a single talus slope opening in front of Grotta del Caviglione in between here back in the Pleistocene and it was only truncated in the late 19th century when the General Atamacei railway was was built there thereby bringing to light some of these sites. The site of Riparo Bambrini is especially interesting because it also comprises the Lake Moestirin and early pro-dorigination sequence and so we have this fairly clear and fairly abrupt passage from one tradition to another tradition. People are making very different things as you'll see in just a minute and we've got a fairly extensive dataset that's procured over a relatively large area over the years for discovering 1976 and excavating punctually in 2002-2005 and then consecutively since 2015 under my direction that of Fabio. And so you've got for the Lake Moestirin a fairly classic discoid Moestirin with lots of pseudo-lovawa points that indicate this type of reduction strategy that dominates at the site. Sometimes you've got a few lovala elements as well but by and large this is the dominant channeau peratoire very geared towards producing small flakes locally based from material procured about five kilometers away from very poor quality conglomerate of flints of various types called the Chocti. In contrast in the pro-dorigination you've got the dominance of blade-leg based channeau peratoire focused almost exclusively on the production of these things but a lot of the production debris includes flakes which were often recycled into splinter pieces. You've got some larger elements as well some points a few hand scrappers fairly classical stuff for the pro-dorigination. So two worlds in terms of what the lithic technology represents for the Moestirin and the pro-dorigination our problem with this is that we saw it's different you didn't need a channeau peratoire you didn't need a reduction sequence perspective to really see this the question is how do you integrate this? And this is a question that has really been the cornerstone of my work since my PhD time and my colleague Michael Barton is here and some of these ideas about how to actually compare assemblages across technological units come from discussions that we've had over 20 years now and so the key thing about stone tools and I think everybody can agree on this even if you're not keen on the idea of optimizing or maximizing utility is that you know proportionally these tall tools are pretty heavy you have to make a trade-off if you're going to carry stones they're carrying something else like food or water or offspring or what have you. Anybody who's done experimental work also knows that lithics just use up or use that very quickly they produce a lot of debitage as you produce lithics themselves I think that Amy's presentation just for was a very good example of that and because of these constraints they are extremely necessary for people to trade them off against something else and so you've got that emerges from these considerations the notion of utility and quantity that we've managed to operationalize in a way to actually put in functional terms and link to issues of mobility and this is just a quote that postates some of this work that we've done with Michael by Steve Kuhn but that encapsulates the idea very well and so basically you have this general negative relationship between the amount of stuff lithically speaking that you're finding in the sandwich and proportion of it that will be retouched and this gives you a rough measure of how people are conceptualizing the stone tool assemblages that they're producing and how you then reconstruct from that land use and mobility strategies and so you can you can plot the amount of stuff you've got here and the amount utility that you want to maximize and then you can conceptualize in the upper right hand assemblages that are fairly curated and in the lower right hand assemblages that are lightly curated lots of pieces little piece a few proportionally fewer retouch and with this you can extrapolate mobility strategies with to refer to the 14 cents a more logistically based system here and a more residentially based system up here and the interesting thing is that once we well this is what it should look like when you put some numbers on it and I refer to the paper that we published a number of years ago to encode some of this stuff but when you actually plot this out for Repar of Umbreni you actually have in the proto recognition a distinct strategy relative to them staring but you have some variability within it as well and even within them staring itself you have some variability so within the general idea of uniformity of the chains of path that are used to produce the lithic systems that in both periods you do have some variability which is interesting and stimulating to think about when you incorporate into your interpretation of the record and here I'm just going to focus on the proto recognition part of things you've got the distribution of various classes of artifacts in the two pro-organization levels that will be one which is at the top and the two which is at the bottom and within that you've got some slight differences in terms of the density in terms of the amount of retouch in terms of typological diversity which is not simply randomly distributed but seems to correspond to different mobility strategies and using that as a jumping board into expectations about how the site was used you see in a two or more organized or clear use of space with clusters of debris being accumulated in some marginal parts of the shelter so a slightly different situation in A1 and for the funnel analysis you also see burning and fragmentation and management of funnel remains that patterns in slightly different ways that are corresponding to this we can also add to this pattern of raw material exploitation that is interesting because at first glance the proto-organization is dominated by the exploitation of the same general sources of raw material but once you look at it a little bit more in a little bit more fine-grained manner you see that there are some differences between the earlier proto-organization of the site starting about 41,000 years ago and the later phase of the proto-organization with some links to central Italy being more dominant or evident in the earlier phase than in the later phase where the link to the south of France is a little bit more pronounced here and with the earlier phase you also have examples of artifacts that have traveled from outcrops located close to Grotta di Fumane which indicates a slightly more broad lithic system that was used to procure in raw material this site in slightly different ways across the proto-organization as well and so you can link typology technology uh techno economy mobility and different things in order to get at the fact that you can get you know a really fine-grained resolution on how these people were behaving people were not just being proto-organization into proto-organization they're also doing things with their lithics and so trying to figure out how these lithics were incorporated into an adaptive system is an important thing and so we've really tried to put the emphasis on how our approaches can be complement complementary as opposed to creating potential tensions and we found that the most important way to make this work is really to kind of always take a step back when we try to approach or develop a plan for lithic analysis and avoid dramatic positions it also helps that we're both Fabio and I relatively young in our career and don't really have a lot of fiefdom I guess to to protect in term of our publication record but this this helps also and I might as well be explicit about this because you know moving away from this dogmatism is an important part as well and so these hybrid perspectives I think can be highly productive we just need to foster environments where they will be able to develop and root themselves in order to lead to better lithic analysis and better understanding of people in the past thank you