Research compendium for 'A pan-European dataset revealing variability in lithic technology, toolkits, and artefact shapes ~15-11 kya'

Research compendium for 'A pan-European dataset revealing variability in lithic technology, toolkits, and artefact shapes ~15-11 kya'

Compendium DOI:

https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7940337

The files at the URL above will generate the results as found in the publication. The files hosted at https://github.com/yesdavid/1511NAC_Dataset are the development versions and may have changed since the paper was published.

Maintainer of this repository:

David N. Matzig ([email protected]; http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7349-5401)

Published in:

Shumon T. Hussain, Felix Riede, David N. Matzig, Miguel Biard, Philippe Crombé, Federica Fontana, Daniel Groß, Thomas Hess, Mathieu Langlais, Javier Fernández-Lopéz de Pablo, Ludovic Mevel, William Mills, Martin Moník, Nicolas Naudinot, Caroline Posch, Tomas Rimkus, Damian Stefański, Hans Vandendriessche (submitted) A pan-European dataset revealing variability in lithic technology, toolkits, and artefact shapes ~15-11 kya. Scientific Data.

Abstract:

Comparative macro-archaeological investigations of the human deep past rely on the availability of unified, quality-checked datasets integrating different layers of observation. Information on the durable and ubiquitous record of Paleolithic stone artefacts and technological choices are especially pertinent to this endeavour. We here present a large expert-sourced collaborative dataset for the study of stone tool technology and artefact shape evolution across Europe between ~15.000 and 11.000 years before present. The dataset contains a compendium of key sites from the study period, and data on lithic technology and toolkit composition at the level of the cultural taxa represented by those sites. The dataset further encompasses 2D shapes of selected lithic artefact groups (armatures, endscrapers, and borers) shared between cultural taxa. These data offer novel possibilities to explore within- and between-region patterns of material culture change to reveal scale-dependent processes of long-term technological evolution in mobile hunter-gatherer societies at the end of the Pleistocene. Our dataset facilitates state-of-the-art quantitative analyses and showcases the benefits of collaborative data collation and synthesis.

Keywords:

Europe; Pleistocene-Holocene transition; Late Glacial archaeology; lithic technology; comparison; macro-archaeology; taxonomy; cultural evolution; digital methods; computational morphometrics; collaborative research; open science

Overview of contents and how to reproduce:

This repository contains data (1_data) and code (2_scripts) for the paper, as well as the 1511NAC_Dataset folder. The 1511NAC_Dataset folder contains all relevant data for the readers to start their own analyses using the dataset. After downloading the complete repository, the results can be reproduced using 1511NAC_dataset.Rproj and the existing folder structure. The required packages and their versions which have been used in this study are listed below and in the DESCRIPTION-file. All analyses and visualisations presented in this paper were prepared in R 4.2.2 under Ubuntu 18.04.5 LTS (64-bit).

Required R-packages and their versions:

data.table (>= 1.14.8), dplyr (>= 1.1.2), forcats (>= 1.0.0), ggforce (>= 0.4.1), ggplot2 (>= 3.4.2), ggpointgrid (>= 1.2.0), ggridges (>= 0.5.4), magrittr (>= 2.0.3), Momocs (>= 1.4.0), outlineR (>= 0.1.0), raster (>= 3.6-20), readr (>= 2.1.4), remotes (>= 2.4.2), rgeos (>= 0.6-2), rworldmap (>= 1.3-6), sp (>= 1.6-0).

Licenses:

Code: MIT http://opensource.org/licenses/MIT, copyright holder: David Nicolas Matzig (2023).

Data and intellectual work: Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), copyright holder: the authors (2023).

Submitted Version

0.1.0

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