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The retouching and resharpening of lithic tools during their production and maintenance leads to the production of large numbers of small flakes and chips known as microdebitage. Standard analytical approaches to this material involves the mapping of microartefact densities to identify activity areas, and the creation of techno-typologies to characterise the form of retouch flakes from different types of tools. Whilst use-wear analysis is a common approach to the analysis of tools, it has been applied much less commonly to microdebitage. This paper contends that the use-wear analysis of microdebitage holds great potential for identifying activity areas on archaeological sites, representing a relatively unexplored analytical resource within microartefact assemblages. In order to test the range of factors that affect the identification of use-wear traces on small retouch flakes, a blind test consisting of 40 retouch flakes was conducted. The results show that wear traces can be identified with comparable levels of accuracy to those reported for historic blind tests of standard lithic tools suggesting that the use-wear analysis of retouch flakes can be a useful analytical tool in understanding site function, and in increasing sample sizes in cases where assemblages contain few tools.

During road construction work, material attributed to the Final Palaeolithic was discovered at Skovmosen I, near Kongens Lyngby on Zealand, eastern Denmark. Although it is regularly mentioned in reviews of the southern Scandinavian Final Palaeolithic, the Skovmosen I assemblage has hitherto remained poorly described. We here review the site’s discovery history and its context. Aided by a three-dimensional digital recording protocol, this article details the assemblage composition and its technology. The assemblage is comprised of tanged points, scrapers and burins, alongside blades and cores as primary reduction products. Although evidently disturbed by the road construction that led to the site’s discovery, the material likely reflects the remains of a small Final Palaeolithic locale, where diverse activities were carried out.

In this paper, we examine the morphological diversity of the tutuli object group from the earlier Nordic Bronze Age (henceforth NBA) – an often over-looked object group despite their abundance specially, temporally and contextually. Currently, only a few studies of the morphological diversity of tutuli have been published, and these consist primarily of decade-old-typologies. The objective of this of this paper is first and foremost methodological, as we examine two research questions – concerning classification and periodisation – through a novel two-dimensional geometric morphometric (henceforth GMM) framework and subsequent multivariate analysis. Inherently we examine whether specific shapes conform to the classificatory of the Montelius typology, and whether a temporal relationship exists between types and shapes.

This is a book review on the co-edited volume dedicated to the manufacture of pressure blade making entitled "The Emergence of Pressure Blade Making".