Intercomparison of Form, Size and Allometry in a Million-year-old and Modern Replicated Handaxe Set

ABSTRACT We report here on an intercomparison between two large handaxe sets – one from a million-year-old site in Africa, the other a modern set made for experimental purposes. Our investigation was designed primarily to determine whether ancient handaxe series have measurable characteristics which tend not to appear in replica sets (and vice versa). We also wished to compare the fields of form variation in the two sets. The particular comparison was chosen because the two sets present similar numbers of handaxes (∼500) from well-defined cultural and raw material contexts, experimental and ancient. We conclude that modern replica sets can approximate ancient material well, offering meaningful “toolkits” for experimental work, but some differences also suggest that original Acheulean sets were influenced by functional and cultural factors which are not immediately obvious. Some allometric shifts present in the ancient set were found to occur also in the replica set, whereas others did not. Some of these variations can be emulated and incorporated in future experimental work.