Theses and Dissertations

Issuing Body

Mississippi State University

Advisor

Miller, Darcy Shane

Committee Member

Peacock, Evan

Committee Member

Thulman, David

Committee Member

Hardin, James W.

Date of Degree

5-1-2020

Document Type

Graduate Thesis - Open Access

Major

Applied Anthropology

Degree Name

Master of Arts

College

College of Arts and Sciences

Department

Department of Anthropology and Middle Eastern Cultures

Abstract

Hafted bifaces known as ‘Big Sandys’ are side-notched lithic tools that are present in Early and Late Archaic contexts, limiting their utility as temporally diagnostic artifacts. I used Cultural Transmission theory to derive an initial expectation that there should be discernable variation due to the incongruous presence of Big Sandys throughout the Archaic and the millennia of time separating the production of these artifacts. I used Geometric Morphometrics to detect potential differences between the haft elements of Early and Late Archaic side-notched points. Statistical analysis of the morphometric data revealed there are differences in the morphology of the haft element between Early and Late Archaic varieties. However, larger sample sizes are necessary to reliably classify a Big Sandy biface from unknown context as belonging to either the Early or Late varieties using morphometrics.

URI

https://hdl.handle.net/11668/16661

Comments

Morphometrics

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