Insights into the Late Mesolithic toolkit: use-wear analysis of the notched blades, case-studies from the Iberian Peninsula

During the last decades we gain a considerable amount of new data about the Mesolithic toolkit in the Western Mediterranean. A large set of instruments probably existed for a variety of purposes: foraging practices (both hunting and fishing), food processing, crafting activities, etc. Expedient, disposable tools, scarcely elaborated, coexisted with formal and more complex instruments, often composed of multiple parts and realized on a variety of materials (e.g. stone, shell or bone inserts; bone or wood hafts, etc.). In this paper we will consider one particular type of tool that appears in the Western Mediterranean starting from the VII-VI millennium cal BC: the notched or denticulated blades. We will consider materials proceedings from five different Late Mesolithic contexts: the Cocina Cave, the Abric de la Falaguera and Vallmayor in the NE of the Peninsula, Artusia rock-shelters in Navarre and Atxoste and Mendandia rock-shelters in the Basque country. The results of our analysis indicate that all the studied materials are characterized by some common traits, both on a technological and functional level. Notches are often shaped through bending fractures, even if some elements are shaped through abrupt retouch. Also the cinematic of the tool appears almost identical in all the observed implements, while the major variability is observed among the worked materials. The notches appear to be used for scraping a variety of materials, from soft vegetal and animal substances, to woody plants or hardanimal material such as bone and antler. Even if data is still too scarce to draw definitive conclusions, we cannot exclude that notched blades represented a particular category of artifact, a crafting tool employable to scrape a variety of materials. However, interpretative problems (the overlaps between use-wear traces) and taphonomic alterations still represent a problem to overcome.