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Examples of tools from Hillswick, Brae, and Modesty, including roughouts from Eschaness and tool distributions around St Magnus Bay.
Source publication
Shortly after arriving in the Shetland archipelago early in the 4th millennium BC, communities began to quarry and make stone tools from riebeckite felsite, quarried from the Northmavine region of North Mainland. The effort expended traveling to the quarry sites, extracting, making and crafting tools was considerable indicating the importance of fe...
Contexts in source publication
Context 1
... evidence for polishing is visible from other sites identified by the project including a small felsite scatter at Tangwick, and from known assemblages at Punds (NRFP analysis), Modesty (Kinghorn 1894; Sheridan 2012), and Crooksetter (Ballin 2017). While Ballin (2017) interprets these sites as "chop shops" where recycling of felsite tools took place, some of the objects may represent primary production using roughouts from the quarry sites, further supporting the hypothesis that the cha^ ıne op eratoire of polished stone tool production is spread, at least across Mainland ( Figure 6). ...
Citations
... Por otro lado, se encontraron vestigios del desarrollo de ornamentos de cerámica y piedra (Kotova et al., 2021), así como evidencia de un esfuerzo por extraer felsita, una roca gris azulada y elaborar con ella herramientas durante la época neolítica (Megarry et al., 2021). Durante este periodo las áreas volcánicas impulsaron varios sucesos, ya que su presencia implicaba tierras fértiles para la agricultura, así como la consolidación de intercambio de bienes, en los cuales la obsidiana jugaba un papel relevante en el establecimiento de redes a corta y larga distancia para el comercio. ...
Actualmente existen importantes publicaciones, tanto en inglés como en español, dedicadas a exponer las propiedades de los materiales con el rigor matemático, físico y químico necesario en la formación de ingenieros. El presente documento representa un esfuerzo por acercar al lenguaje de los diseñadores las propiedades de los materiales utilizados en la elaboración de productos. Se trata de un esfuerzo consciente en donde se pone de manifiesto la experiencia de la autora en el riguroso mundo de las propiedades de los materiales, y al mismo tiempo se intenta expresar cada propiedad en un lenguaje accesible a todos aquellos interesados en entender cómo y de qué se conforman los productos de consumo.
... This condition demands the integration of terrestrial and underwater evidence as a continuous archaeological landscape in order to better understanding the past, where studies focus not only on coastal sites per se, but on localities or micro-regions within which human activity of interest is expected (O'Shea 2021). The integration of terrestrial and underwater evidence can also be approached under the heading of network studies in insular contexts (Gustas and Supernant 2019;Megarry et al. 2021) in order to assess seafaring traffic in the past between islands or through channel and fiords. ...
We analyze the finding of a lithic projectile point at more than 100 meters depth in the Beagle Channel (Tierra del Fuego, Argentina) in relation to submerged landscapes. On the one hand, this underwater evidence is examined as part of an inundated archaeological landscape supporting the hypothesized Pleistocene coastal dispersion in southern South America. On the other hand, the lithic projectile point is evaluated as a submerged isolated artefact as the result of human movements through aquatic environments due to foraging and transport practices in the sea during the Holocene. Technological properties and post-depositional modifications of the projectile point are described, and the artefact location is assessed in light of paleogeographic models. The presented evidence does not support an early human occupation in the region, but the particular archaeological detection offers insights to the alternative explanation, and to the potential of underwater explorations in the region.
In this introduction to a special issue by the same title for The Journal of Island and Coastal Archaeology (vol. 18.4), we open a dialogue on the validity of the enduring "laboratory" metaphor for archaeological research by referring to the papers in the SI and to current debates in the natural and social sciences.
Anthropologists after World War II were vocal in saying the apparent remoteness and marginality of islands in the Pacific made them laboratories of a sort. In 1997, however, Terry Hunt, Chris Gosden, and I reported that by then another research agenda had replaced this old one in the Pacific. Rather than seeing these islands as distant and undeveloped human colonies scattered across a vast and empty expanse of sea, modern scholarship was discovering the Pacific had long been a sphere of human accomplishments, and the ocean itself had long been an avenue for interchange, not a barrier to human affairs. Today, however, it seems we were being too optimistic. Islands are still often described in ways suggesting they are basically remote, isolated, and bounded miniature worlds. As a scientific category, however, islands vary in their size, shape, environmental characteristics, degree of isolation, and the like, and I would argue that it is not a foregone conclusion that working on islands has a decided edge over doing field work anywhere else on Earth.
