LAUSR

The refitting of lithic artefacts has a long tradition in Palaeolithic archaeology, having been used in stone tool studies since the 1880s (Smith 1894; Spurrell 1880). Until the late 1960s, this method, which consists of finding the joints between stone elements extracted from the same block, much like a 3D jigsaw puzzle, was only discontinuously and occasionally applied. Since then, the increasing use of refits has most likely been caused by the quality of the archaeological record found at the Magdalenian site at Pincevent in France, where the reconstruction of the social and economic organisation of reindeer hunter communities was allowed through refits (Leroi-Gourhan and Brézillon 1966, 1972). During these early years, refitting analysis was not only introduced to European studies, for example at Gönnersdorf in Germany (Bosinski 1975), but also in Africa at Munyama Cave by Victoria Lake (van Noten 1971) and Gombe in Zaire (Cahen 1976) and in North America at the Casper site in Colorado (Frison 1974). Since the 1970s, refits have been applied mainly to two fields of research: taphonomy and ‘anthropological’ studies (Larson and Ingbar 1992:151). In taphonomic studies, refits have been used to evaluate the non-anthropic and postdepositional processes that have caused the displacement of archaeological items (e.g. Hofman 1986; Villa 1982). The anthropological application of refits has been mainly focused on two research lines: technology and intra-site spatial distribution (for a complete bibliography on the history of refitting, see Arts and Cziesla 1990 and Schurmans 2007). Looking at the technological studies, refits have been used to reconstruct stone tool production processes and transport. Some multidisciplinary studies have included use-wear analysis to investigate the relationship between a specific stone tool and its function (Cahen et al. 1979; Odell 1981). For spatial applications, refits have been used to investigate settlement dynamics through the identification of intra-site activity areas (characterised by the clustering of archaeological remains and a high rate of refits) and the relationships between these areas as highlighted by intra-site connection lines between long-distance refitted items. Based on the extension of an activity area and the technological characteristics of the refitted items, refits have also been applied sporadically for identifying the number of occupational events in an activity area and inferring the number of individuals knapping there (Cahen and Keeley 1980). In 1987, refits were formally acknowledged for the first time as a preferred method for reconstructing and understanding the past. In that year, Erwin Cziesla, Sabine Eickhoff, Nico * Francesca Romagnoli [email protected]