Biology Reference
In-Depth Information
tion, along with observations of percussion scars on flakes, also helped
Moore determine how the Flores knappers had held and rotated the
gists were, thus, able to infer some conventionalized movements used
by
Homo floresiensis
from stones!
Moore's hard work produced a fascinating picture of hobbit material
culture. Their tools and production techniques changed very little while
Homo floresiensis
lived at Liang Bua between 95,000 and 17,000 years ago.
The “early reduction flakes,” which far outnumbered the other types
of stone tools recovered from Liang Bua, were made with the freehand
technique, that is, simply by striking cores with hard-hammers. Three
other methods were also used to create various flake tools: In the trunca-
tion technique, flakes were placed on flat stones (anvils) and then broken
by delivering blows to their flattest surfaces with hammerstones. The
bipolar technique was similar, except the flakes were placed edge-on
with respect to the anvil and struck with hammerstones on their upper-
most edges. The fourth technique used at Liang Bua was burination, in
which knappers struck flakes from the edges of cores, which resulted
in tools with sharp cutting edges. The more pointed tools that resulted
from burination were probably used as perforators. These techniques
were relatively undemanding and similar to those used by nonmodern
hominins elsewhere in Southeast Asia.
Hobbits made their tools out of water-rolled cobbles they picked
up in a local riverbed and from fine-grained chert gathered from river
gravels. Whole cobbles and relatively large flake “blanks” were carried
into the cave to be knapped into various tools. Older flaking debris was
also reused to make tools. Although the stone technology used at Liang
Bua was, according to Moore and his colleagues, “unsophisticated when
measured against archaeological convention,” there is ample evidence
that the knappers there “were not only skilled at applying their chosen
techniques, but they also had a large repertoire of . . . technique combi-
nations
—that were themselves mixed in non-random ways. . . . A com-
plex decision-making process was operating, although the factors gov-
