From hunter-gatherers to farmers: contributions of traceology to the study of prehistoric lithic technology in Arabia

Archaeological investigations of the Terminal Pleistocene and Early Holocene human occupation of the nearly 3 million square kilometres that make up the vast and diverse landscapes of the Arabian Peninsula are hampered by a series of shortcomings. Some of the problems when trying to reconstruct human occupation and behaviour based on material culture are imposed by the state of preservation of archaeological finds. The shift from dry to wet and back to dry conditions at the end of the Holocene climate optimum has obliterated all prehistoric organic remains, leaving archaeologists with nothing but dust and rocks. In order to reconstruct how humans have adapted to these, at times, challenging environments, archaeologists have turned to the most durable of human cultural expressions: Lithics. While technology and typology are used to classify lithic artefacts, traceology, i.e., the study of tool use, provides insights into the kinetics of stone tools as well as tasks accomplished and materials transformed with the help of these. This article reports on traceological data from the prehistory of Arabia from the Upper Palaeolithic to the Late Palaeolithic and the Neolithic. We address shifting technological and functional paradigms and discuss the limitations of their interpretation, mostly imposed by taphonomic alterations on the lithic assemblages.