Submitted by Anonymous on Tue, 08/05/2008 - 05:14
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Kuril Islands Biocomplexity 08

Hello KBP Team,

I just got a chance to get caught up with your journal entries -- sounds like the expedition is going well. Can you describe the lithic assemblage that you have recovered so far from your excavations? Anything new or different from what we've seen before?

Colby

Mon, 08/11/2008 - 13:05

KBP Team

Hey Colby! I haven't had a chance to look at the materials from the Ekarma excavations, so have only seen a bit from here on Rasshua, and what we found in our Archy Surveys of Makanrushi, Kharimkotan, Onekotan, and N. Shiashkotan.
During the survey work, we found very low diversity of raw material types: I'd say that 95-98% of what we found was fine-grained basalt, which looks to me like it probably as sourced locally. There was a bit of red-colored and butterscotch-colored chert, plus a few flakes of obsidian from almost everywhere we looked.
Now that we're here on Rasshua, things are looking pretty different. First off, there's a clear- to milky-white chert source on the headland below the site. Yes, there's quite a bit of fine-grained basalt in the assemblage ("assemblage", for the rest of you, is a fancy term for "the pile of stuff we got from this site). But there is also quite a bit of the red-colored and butterscotch-colored chert, a chert that is white-ish with purple-ish tints. And, I'm sure you'll be happy to hear, more obsidian!
As far as finished tools is concerned, I haven't actually seen all that many. But the few tools I have seen do not seem out-of-the-ordinary: a few small projectile points, a few larger bifacial tools ("bifacial" means sharpened from both sides of the flat surface of the cutting edge, as opposed to "unifacial" which means only sharpened from one side"), and some scrapers.
--Mike