Abstract
Many studies have shown that micro-wear analysis can identify some parameters such as worked material and motion direction with varying degrees of success. However, because experiments have traditionally been carried out by un-monitored humans, we do not fully understand the role of force in wear formation. Here, we compare the amount of wear produced by duration vs. applied force in a controlled experiment and using both the inspection of optical images and quantitative parameters describing surface topography. We used flint flakes attached to a force/torque controllable robot arm to scrape standardized beech wooden planks under constant force profiles. The force profiles were obtained by previous experiments in scraping described by Pfleging et al. (PLoS One 10, Pfleging et al. 2015). We varied the force level and use duration among the experiments. Worn pieces were imaged with an Alicona InfiniteFocus G4 microscope and the polished parts of the flakes were analyzed using areal field parameters from metrology. The data is publicly available on the internet. Results indicate that use duration contributes more significantly to polish formation than force, confirming assumptions made in human experiments performed in the 1980s. Moreover, simple metrological height parameters appear inadequate for capturing the degree of polish. We conclude that more sophisticated quantitative methods are required to go beyond the subjective human evaluation of optical images to reconstruct past human action.
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Notes
Often, kilogram is used to express the equivalent mass necessary to generate a certain force under gravity. However, we refer directly to force and therefore we use the unit, Newton (N), since it is the SI standard for that dimension. One kilogram corresponds to 9.81 N.
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Acknowledgements
The authors thank Martin Street (Römisch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, MONREPOS Archäologisches Forschungszentrum, Neuwied, Germany) for help with knapping the stone tools. The authors further thank Mike Lyrenmann (ITA, ETH Zürich) for supporting the set-up design, ETH Zürich carpentry for providing the workpieces, Karl and Maren of Prof. Uwe Sauers group (IMSB, ETH Zürich) for providing facilities and help with the chemical cleaning, Prof. Robert Flatt and Asel Maria Aguilar Sanchez (IfB, ETH Zürich) for supporting the microscopy, Dr. Robert Voss (IWF, ETH Zürich) and Constantin Herbst for help with the Alicona microscope, Daniel Seidel (Deutsches Institut für Luft und Raumfahrt) for providing example code of the KUKA API, Prof. James Stemp for providing image test data and advice, John D’Errico for his MATLAB interpolation function, and Francesco Bocale (KUKA Roboter Schweiz AG) for supporting the robot arm. Finally, we like to thank our colleagues from the Agile & Dexterous Robotics Lab, ETH Zürich for general suggestions and help during the project.
Funding
This research has been supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation through a Professorship Award to Jonas Buchli (www.snf.ch) and by Research Grants of ETH Zürich (www.ethz.ch), ETH-36 14-1 (JB/JP).
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Table of experimental parameters of each trial sorted by flake-sample ID. The columns are FlakeID: unique identifier of the flake sample; TrialID: unique identifier of the trial; ForceLevel: value of the vertical force in Newton applied during the trial; NumStrokes: number of scraping strokes executed during the trial; and NumMeasurements: number of topographic images of the flake sample taken under the microscope after the trial was finished. (XLSX 9.63 kb)
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Pfleging, J., Iovita, R. & Buchli, J. Influence of force and duration on stone tool wear: results from experiments with a force-controlled robot. Archaeol Anthropol Sci 11, 5921–5935 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0729-0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12520-018-0729-0