The Functional Hypothesis: A Formal Approach to Use-Wear Experiments and Settlement-Subsistence

The articulation of experiments, observations of prehistoric use-wear, and settlement-subsistence model testing has remained implicit in most studies and largely oriented toward cultural reconstructionism. This paper discusses the weaknesses of the analogy-based approach and suggests an alternative that uses experiments and other means to test the hypothesis that functional dimensions are represented in a prehistoric assemblage. The results of a quantified use-wear experiment based on microfracture damage are presented, focusing on variable covariance and interaction. A similarly studied prehistoric data set is compared to the experimental results, but without reference to activity-specific designations. We show how this formal approach can be used in testing settlement-subsistence models from east-central Arizona.

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