A microburin is a characteristic waste product from manufacture of lithic tools — sometimes confused with an authentic burin — which is characteristic of the

Mesolithic The Mesolithic (Ancient Greek language, Greek: μέσος, ''mesos'' 'middle' + λίθος, ''lithos'' 'stone') or Middle Stone Age is the Old World archaeological period between the Upper Paleolithic and the Neolithic. The term Epipaleolithic i ...

, but which has been recorded from the end of the

Upper Paleolithic The Upper Paleolithic (or Upper Palaeolithic) is the third and last subdivision of the Paleolithic or Old Stone Age. Very broadly, it dates to between 50,000 and 12,000 years ago (the beginning of the Holocene), according to some theories ...

until the

Chalcolithic The Chalcolithic ( ) (also called the Copper Age and Eneolithic) was an archaeological period characterized by the increasing use of smelted copper. It followed the Neolithic and preceded the Bronze Age. It occurred at different periods in di ...

. This type of lithic artifact was first named by

Henri Breuil Henri Édouard Prosper Breuil (28 February 1877 – 14 August 1961), often referred to as Abbé Breuil (), was a French Catholic Church, Catholic priest, archaeologist, anthropologist, ethnologist and geologist. He studied cave art in the Somme ( ...

who defined it as "a type of angular, smooth, with a terminal retouch in the form of a small notch". Breuil initially thought that the microburins had a functional use as a type of microlithic burin. However, he later came to realize that the manufacturing technique was different from that of the burin and that they could be waste products from the manufacture of

microliths A microlith is a small Rock (geology), stone tool usually made of flint or chert and typically a centimetre or so in length and half a centimetre wide. They were made by humans from around 60,000 years ago, across Europe, Africa, Asia and Austral ...

, but they may have occasionally been reused for a useful purpose, which is expected for parsimonious lithic resource exploitation A microburin is a fragment of a

lithic flake In archaeology, a lithic flake is a "portion of rock (geology), rock removed from an objective piece by percussion or pressure,"Andrefsky, W. (2005) ''Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis''. 2d Ed. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press and ...

, or more precisely, of a lithic blade, that shows on its upper face the beginnings of a notch terminating in an oblique flection (whose surface can only be seen from the lower side) that ends in a very acute trihedral apex. It was thought that microburins were exclusively a class of functional microliths, but knapping experiments, along with the refitting of contiguous pieces, have demonstrated that they are a characteristic waste product of an advanced lithic reduction process known as microburin technique - or more correctly, microburin blow technique, following a study of thousands of microburins originating from a variety of

Sahara The Sahara (, ) is a desert spanning across North Africa. With an area of , it is the largest hot desert in the world and the list of deserts by area, third-largest desert overall, smaller only than the deserts of Antarctica and the northern Ar ...

n sites. Jacques Tixier noted that none of the examples studied showed unambiguous traces of intentional use, which also validates observation of lack of use wear from analysis of European pieces. Examples found in Europe can be seen on this page : https://web.archive.org/web/20090131231751/http://archeobase.be/page_microburins_meso.html, which are associated with Mesolithic hunters of

Wallonia Wallonia ( ; ; or ), officially the Walloon Region ( ; ), is one of the three communities, regions and language areas of Belgium, regions of Belgium—along with Flemish Region, Flanders and Brussels. Covering the southern portion of the c ...

(

Belgium Belgium, officially the Kingdom of Belgium, is a country in Northwestern Europe. Situated in a coastal lowland region known as the Low Countries, it is bordered by the Netherlands to the north, Germany to the east, Luxembourg to the southeas ...

) (approximately 9,000 BP). There is also a particular type of microburin named after KrukowskiKrukowski, Stefan (1914) - "Un nouveau rebut du microlithique". Extrait des ''Comptes Rendus de la Société Scientifique de Varsovie'' that is from a ''carving accident'' and not a waste byproduct.

Notes

{{reflist Lithics Archaeological artefact types

See also

Notes