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Welcome to the Digital Technologies, Acheulean Handaxes and the Social Landscapes of the Lower Palaeolithic project

Museums across Britain look after a huge numbers of handaxes. As distinctively shaped stone tools, they provide an indicator of the periods when early humans occupied Britain. During the Lower Palaeolithic, climate was punctuated by a series of ice ages, and people were only present during the succession of intervening warm periods, known as interglacials. Improved geological dating allows us to assign key sites and their associated handaxes to specific interglacials.

The Digital Technologies project aims to study changes in handaxe form from one interglacial to the next, and to identify regional forms within each interglacial that might reflect different cultural groups. The research will demonstrate how Neanderthal peoples carefully selected their raw materials, as well as the specific ways the tools were designed and made. As well as identifying potential cultural groups, the team will draw new inferences about the growing influence of social norms on handaxe form. Our research uses state of the art scanning and imaging technologies provided by Durham’s Department of Archaeology to create detailed 3D models of around stone tools in housed in collections within the British Museum and other museums. These tools originate from multiple sites, representing a period of 300,000 years in which our early ancestors occupied the British landscape.

Aims

This project will:

  • Produce a definitive digital database of handaxe assemblages using state-of-the-art 3D scanning technologies to facilitate newly developed 3D methods of analyses;
  • Establish a more detailed understanding of handaxe variation in the British Lower Palaeolithic;
  • Quantify the effects on variation of rock type and form, shaping techniques and skill, reduction intensity, function, landscape context, and design;
  • Contribute to current research on early human social development, drawing on psychological models for the emergence of more complex group behaviour;
  • Explore how social norms as expressed through handaxe forms, helped group cohesion and interaction;
  • Improve accessibility and reduce the carbon footprint of stone tool analysis through the availability of a high resolution handaxe scan database.