Assessing raw material’s role in bipolar and freehand miniaturized flake shape, technological structure, and fragmentation rates

This paper concludes a long-term experimental study to examine the role of bipolar and freehand reduction as strategies for lithic miniaturization on milky quartz and flint. The experiments provide clear quantifiable guidelines for identifying bipolar reduction in archeological assemblages. They suggest that with bipolar reduction—a straightforward and time-efficient strategy to learn—toolmakers could easily surpass the cutting edge/mass...