Jordan Brown, AJ White and Felicia DePeña
The archaeological surface record is greatly underexploited. Provided it is possible to control for taphonomic factors by identifying patches of the land surface that have remained geomorphically stable since the period of interest (in this case, the Early/Middle Epipaleolithic), the geospatial distribution of lithic artifacts may indicate a great deal about land-use and mobility. Over two days in Summer 2019, I worked with colleagues Felicia De Peña and AJ White to survey the environs of Kharaneh IV, using both a quadrat-survey technique—in order to rapidly characterize the overall distribution of lithic artifacts (and nonanthropogenic flint) on the surface—and a photogrammetric survey coupled with exhaustive artifact tagging and resurvey.
This work was designed as a proof-of-concept for an expedited photogrammetric approach to distributional lithic survey, which is usually prohibitively time-consuming. The snapshots of a sample orthomosaic and 3D model attached here demonstrate the success of the technique: approximately 600 sq-m of such data was collected over the course of only a few hours. The tagged & numbered artifacts (visible in one of the attached photos) provide a computer-detectable signature, so that their spatial position may be extracted automatically from the tagged orthomosaic. This allows precise analysis of the spatial distribution of individual lithics over a large area.
Once photoprocessing and refinement is complete, the geospatial results of the quadrat survey will be statistically compared with those of the photogrammetric survey, in order to see if different patterns are detectable at different scales of analysis. Subsequently, this method will be applied to stable surfaces (as described above) identified in the vicinity of Kharaneh, in order to compare the distributions there with those of areas of secondary deposition, and as a comparison against models of land-use and mobility near the site.