“The Fall of the House of Flint”: A Zooarchaeological Perspective on the Decline of Chipped Stone Tools for Butchering Animals in the Bronze and Iron Ages of the Southern Levant
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In recent years, it has been recognized that chipped stone tools continue to be used after the end of the Neolithic in spite of the introduction of metallurgy. However, the rate of change from a lithic to metal-based economy is affected by the type of tool and its various functions. Traditionally, this change is monitored through the frequencies and presence/absence of the various lithic tool types. These data are often negatively affected by the haphazardly collected lithic collections from Bronze and later sites. Recently, an alternative approach to monitoring the shift in technology has been proposed. Microscopic examination of butchering marks on animal bones allows the type of raw material (stone versus metal) and the type of implement (blade versus scraper) to be reconstructed. In this paper, zooarchaeological data from the southern Levant (Israel and Palestinian Authority Territory) will be used to demonstrate the nature and rate of change from a stone to a metal-based animal butchering technology during the Bronze Age. The data demonstrate that chipped stone tools use continues to be widespread during the Early Bronze Age at both urban and rural sites for the butchering of animal remains and tool making. From the beginning of the Middle Bronze Age (II), there is a dramatic shift in emphasis to a metal-based technology (ca. 80 percent) corresponding with the spread of high quality tin-bronze metal knives. In the Late Bronze Age, the frequency of chipped stone tools continues to decline. The transition from stone to a metal-based butchering technology is almost complete by the Iron Age, but chipped stone tools never fully disappear in the butchering process even in subsequent periods. Chipped stone tools continue in use long after the end of the Neolithic.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".