How Surprising are Lithic Reduction Strategies? The Information Entropy of the Modes A-I Framework

Abstract

ABSTRACT How surprising are the contents of lithic assemblages? If an archeologist excavated an archeological site somewhere in Eurasia and uncovered evidence of Levallois core technology, how surprising would it be? The surprise in the content of a new assemblage is a function of what is underground as well as our prior knowledge about prehistory. How improved is our understanding of the past when another site is excavated? The answer is a measure of the information contained in lithic assemblages. We present a primer on information theory, which provides tools necessary to conceptualize, measure, and analyze information. We then apply the theory by measuring the information contained in a large comparative dataset describing the presence or absence of technological modes across Late Pleistocene modern human assemblages. We find that technological modes tend to have little conditional dependency with one another, suggesting that lithic assemblages do have relatively high information content.