DIFFERENCES WITHIN THE TOOL-MAKING TRADITIONS
The latter three great traditions in the manufacture of stone tools—and the less clear-cut pebble tools before them—are all we have to show of the cultures of the men of those times. Changes happened in each of the traditions. As time went on, the tools in each tradition were better made. There could also be slight regional differences in the tools within one tradition. Thus, tools with small differences, but all belonging to one tradition, can be given special group (facies) names.
This naming of special groups has been going on for some time. Here are some of these names, since you may see them used in museum displays of flint tools, or in books. Within each tradition of tool-making (save the chopper tools), the earliest tool type is at the bottom of the list, just as it appears in the lowest beds of a geological stratification.[3]
[3] Archeologists usually make their charts and lists with the earliest materials at the bottom and the latest on top, since this is the way they find them in the ground.
Chopper tool (all about equally early):
Anyathian (Burma)
Choukoutienian (China)
Patjitanian (Java)
Soan (India)
Flake:
“Typical Mousterian”
Levalloiso-Mousterian
Levalloisian
Tayacian
Clactonian (localized in England)
Core-biface:
Some blended elements in “Mousterian”
Micoquian (= Acheulean 6 and 7)
Acheulean
Abbevillian (once called “Chellean”)
Pebble tool:
Oldowan
Ain Hanech
pre-Stellenbosch
Kafuan
The core-biface and the flake traditions appear in the chart ([p. 65]).
The early archeologists had many of the tool groups named before they ever realized that there were broader tool preparation traditions. This was understandable, for in dealing with the mixture of things that come out of glacial gravels the easiest thing to do first is to isolate individual types of tools into groups. First you put a bushel-basketful of tools on a table and begin matching up types. Then you give names to the groups of each type. The groups and the types are really matters of the archeologists’ choice; in real life, they were probably less exact than the archeologists’ lists of them. We now know pretty well in which of the early traditions the various early groups belong.