Reading the Cleaver from a Technical Perspective

The Jeongok-ri site is a representative Paleolithic site on the Korean Peninsula and is a key site for international academic debates on the existence of the Acheulean in East Asia. Up to now, the bifaces excavated from this site have been mainly studied with a typological methodology based on form. However, this methodology has a limitation in that it does not clearly indicate the difference between the two types of bifaces, hand-axe and cleaver. Therefore, in this paper, we tried to define and classify the cleaver as an alternative from the technical point of view. From a technological point of view, the key to a cleaver lies in ‘predetermination’, such as whether the time of creation of the cutting edge and the shape of the stone tool are determined at the debitage or the shaping stage and various types of cleavers can also be classified according to the degree of predetermination. From this point of view, as a result of analyzing five cleavers found in the excavation in 2021, most of them showed high-level skills. In addition, a technical comparison was made with the cleavers excavated from Acheulian sites in North Africa, but no significant difference was found between the two regions

Acheulean · Archaeology · Debitage · Digging · Excavation · Geography · Geometry · Linguistics · Peninsula · Stone tool · Forensic Anthropology and Bioarchaeology Studies · Image Processing and 3D Reconstruction · Mathematics · Philosophy · Pleistocene-Era Hominins and Archaeology