Stone Artefacts

Principal Investigators:
Tristan Carter (Stanford)
Tania Gerousi (Fitch Laboratory, BSA)

 

The regular recovery of chipped and ground stone artefacts was an integral part of KIP's tract-walking and site collection strategies, and has generated ca. 4977 examples of the former and ca. 300 of the latter.

Chipped stone and ground stone are important not only as evidence for economic practices, such as hunting or food-processing, and sometimes as chronological markers (primarily chipped stone), but also provide important evidence for the movement of lithic resources into and within the island, thereby acting as proxy means for understanding internal circulation patterns and off-island trade. Preliminary evidence suggests that whilst the chipped stone material includes a significant proportion of imports (mainly Melian obsidian), as well as local Kytheran material, the ground stone is overwhelmingly of local origin. Study of the chipped and ground stone artefacts was effectively completed during 2002-3, barring an upcoming raw materials prospection season, whose aim is to identify local sources securely and, it is hoped, characterise their geology formally through petrological analysis. With this last phase complete, the aim is to publish the final results of the analysis of the stone artefacts during 2005.

The menu above right offers additional information on research into KIP's chipped and ground stone assemblages.