Alternative Interpretation of the Levallois Reduction Technique

Following a long history of typologically based frameworks, the last decade or so has seen a trend among many Palaeolithic researchers towards trying to understand the underlying technology of stone tool systems. This has included some fresh approaches to perceptions of the Levallois reduction technique (e.g.,Geneste 1991; Van Peer 1992; Boeda 1995; Schlanger 1996; Brantingham and Kuhn 2001), and these have gone a long way toward improving our understanding of the technique and its variants. The traditional view of why the Levallois technique was used foremost as a method for producing a limited number of flakes of predetermined size and shape from each coreremains the dominant one in the literature, and may well be accurate. It does provide a simple and logical explanation for much of the data.