See you for the Binalot Talk on 21st February, 12:00pm. Dante Ricardo Manipon of the School of Archaeology, University of the Philippines will give a talk titled 'Trashed or Treasured? Little Stone Flakes at Eme Cave: Slices of Life from Around Four Thousand Years Ago'.

This session is onsite only.

Abstract
During the late Holocene, the practice of agriculture as well as the introduction of ceramics had reached Northeastern Luzon and the Cagayan Valley and were most likely spread by Austronesian speakers from Taiwan. Meanwhile, populations who had arrived earlier and relied on foraging had been continuing their stone tool-making traditions since the Pleistocene in the upland caves of Peñablanca. This is evident at Eme cave, which has a preceramic layer yielding a lithic assemblage with the associated radiocarbon date of 3990-3690 cal BP (Wk-14883). Moreover, these lithic artifacts suggest that Eme cave was where foragers engaged in the production of stone flakes from six main types of raw material. Three types of raw material were common while the other three types were rare. The abundant raw materials included larger usable flake products left at the cave. The rarer raw materials were composed of mostly smaller flakes and suggested that these raw materials were scarce in the immediate locality and that they came from farther away. This seems to imply that before the onset of agricultural societies, foragers in Northeastern Luzon have had a long established familiarity with the area and its resources in particular, the caves, forests, and rivers. There was thus an enduring knowledge of how to select locally-available rocks of different qualities. Furthermore, the practice of manufacturing effective cutting implements needed immediately for subsistence activities inside the caves survived into the Holocene. As such, the lithic quantities left behind at Eme cave have permitted a glimpse into the lives of hunter-gatherers from around four thousand years ago. Finally, these lithic artifacts may have also prompted the reevaluation of how we define that space where they were left behind, blurring the lines between discard, workshop, and storage area.