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Used to think every flint scatter was a campsite until a guy at a dig in Devon asked me one question that wrecked me
I did field work for 4 years and if I saw 30 plus pieces of debitage in a plowed field I wrote it up as a base camp. Every time. Nobody told me different.
Two summers back I was on a walkover in Devon with a lithics specialist who has been doing this since the 80s. I pointed at a spread and called it a campsite. He just asked me where the cores were. I had no answer. Turned out that scatter was a knapping spot where people sat for an afternoon and made tools before moving on. Nothing to do with living there.
Now I see the debate in every paper I read. One side says small scatters mean short stays, people on the move. Other side says density alone tells you nothing and you need retouch, hearth features, all of it. I honestly do not know who is right anymore.
So how do you all read a surface scatter? Do you trust the tool count or do you need the floor features before you call it anything?
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angelas788d ago
That question about the cores would have wrecked me too, because four years of writing up scatters as base camps is a lot of reports to look back on. The thing is, debitage just means people sat down and worked stone somewhere, and that could be a lunch break or a whole season of living. Without hearths or retouched tools in the mix, density really is just a pile of chips and nothing more.
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