Polish is quantitatively different on quartzite flakes used on different worked materials.

2020

Metrology has been successfully used in the last decade to quantify use-wear on stone tools. Such techniques have been mostly applied to fine-grained rocks (chert), while studies on coarse-grained raw materials have been relatively infrequent. In this study, confocal microscopy was employed to investigate polished surfaces on a coarse-grained lithology, quartzite. Wear originating from contact with five different worked materials were classified in a data-driven approach using machine learning. Two different classifiers, a decision tree and a support-vector machine, were used to assign the different textures to a worked material based on a selected number of parameters (Mean density of furr…