The Piney Branch site (District of Columbia, U.S.A.) and the significance of the quarry-refuse model for the interpretation of lithics sites

In the 1870s the amateur archaeologist Dr Charles Abbott discovered roughly-flaked bifacial artefacts that he called “paleoliths” near Trenton, New Jersey, which he claimed were artefact types similar to Lower Palaeolithic handaxes being found in western Europe at that time. This interpretation gave rise to what has been called the Great Palaeolithic War, a debate in the United States about the existence of an “American Palaeolithic” that only ended in 1890 when the archaeologist William H. Holmes from the Smithsonian Institution excavated the Piney Branch lithics site in Washington D.C.. On the basis of the bifacial reduction sequence that he reconstructed from the lithics excavated at Piney Branch, Holmes argued that any resemblance of paleoliths to Lower Palaeolithic handaxes was accidental. Holmes believed that paleoliths were discarded elements from the sequential reduction of stone nodules (which he called the “Progressive Series”) by recent American Indian knappers during the manufacture of projectile points. In other words, the Trenton paleoliths, and by implication similar roughly-flaked bifaces, were nothing more than quarry refuse (or “waste”). Since Holmes’ day the quarry-refuse model for the interpretation of large roughly-flaked bifacial implements as “waste” and not artefact types used in other activities, particularly for lithics sties in the arid western regions of the US, has been applied at times without adequate bridging arguments. A review of Holmes’ interpretation of the Piney Branch evidence suggests that his quarry-refuse model, even when applied to Piney Branch, required numerous untested assumptions, and that the model may inadvertently obscure a range of other prehistoric activities not strictly related to quarrying and knapping. As a consequence, the application of the quarry-refuse model today to lithics sites found in North America without careful examination may also fail to identify the complete range of cultural activity at those sites, and should be applied to lithics sites only with due caution and the testing of alternative hypotheses.