13 South African Archaeological Bulletin 59 (179): 13–17, 2004 ABSTRACT The authors and three students met for workshops on several occasions in Cape Town and Stellenbosch with the goal of defining a taxonomic system for chipped stone artefacts that can be applied to materials from the Early, Middle and Later Stone Age. The motivation for defining a ‘unified taxonomy’ stems from the need to develop a system for classifying multi- component surface assemblages. The proposed taxonomy revises southern African systems by applying ideas and methods from European approaches to lithic technology. Given that much confusion exists on the classification of cores and core reduction, the lithic workshops focused on this class of artefact. Most of the variation encountered when examining material from Anyskop, Blombos, Geelbek, Hollow Rock Shelter and Klasies River Mouth could be placed within the taxa of Inclined, Parallel and Platform cores. These categories form the basis of the proposed taxonomy with the additional taxa of Initial, Multidirectional, Indeterminate Broken, Bipolar and Other being necessary for a small proportion of the cores that fall outside the range of the three main taxa. Blind tests using assemblages of cores from Blombos, Geelbek and Anyskop yielded a satisfactory degree of reproducibility and lend credibility to the proposed taxonomy. This paper also considers other key variables of cores including: the morphology of end products, degree of reduction, numbers of striking and removal surfaces, and degree of platform preparation. Key Words: Lithic artefacts, lithic technology, classification Introduction In recent decades there has been a divergence of research traditions in lithic analysis between Europe and southern Africa. In continental Europe, building on the work of Leroi- Gourhan (1943), Tixier (1978) and others, many advances have been made to improve our understanding of the principles of lithic technology. Meanwhile in southern Africa, and perhaps sub-Saharan Africa as a whole, studies of lithic technology have not kept pace. In the context of joint South African, French and German research programs, this trend had become increasingly evident so that we have reached a point where European researchers can scarcely understand the work of southern African colleagues and vice versa. Wurz (2002) has discussed this issue in her work at Klasies River Mouth but many colleagues familiar with these questions have begun to realize that the language and interpretative concepts used by southern African and continental European researchers are nearly mutually unintelligible. To address these problems, the authors and three students participated in a series of workshops on lithic technology held at Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Stellenbosch University and the University of Cape Town. Taxonomy is only one of the methodological tools that allow researchers to achieve a refined understanding of lithic technology. Classifying lithic artefacts does not constitute an end in itself; it should be seen as one step in the overall analysis of lithic artefacts in relation to patterns of human behaviour. A complete analysis should establish where and in what archaeological context the entire lithic reduction sequence from the procurement of raw material to the discard of all classes of artefacts took place. Lithic analysis should address the production of and discrimination between blanks as well as the manufacture, use, maintenance and discard of retouched forms. A taxonomy for cores and methods of knapping, as presented here, reflects only a small part of the potential universe of lithic analyses. Figure 1. Generalized representations of the three main core types, a) Inclined, b) Parallel, c) Platform (a and b modified after Boëda 1993a and Soressi 2002). Existing systems of classification used in South Africa (Singer & Wymer 1982, Volman 1981, Deacon 1982, Thackeray & Kelly 1988) are often typologically oriented and rarely aim A UNIFIED LITHIC TAXONOMY BASED ON PATTERNS OF CORE REDUCTION NICHOLAS J. CONARD 1 , MARIE SORESSI 2 , JOHN E. PARKINGTON 3 , SARAH WURZ 4 & ROYDEN YATES 5 1 Institut für Ur- und Frühgeschichte und Archäologie des Mittelalters, Abteilung Ältere Urgeschichte und Quartärökologie, Tübingen, Germany. Email: nicholas.conard@uni-tuebingen.de. 2 Institut de Préhistoire et de Géologie du Quaternaire, Université de Bordeaux 1, Talence, France. 3 Dept of Archaeology, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa. 4 Dept of Geography & Environmental Studies, University of Stellenbosch, Matieland, South Africa. 5 Division of Social History, Iziko Museums of Cape Town, Cape Town, South Africa. Received October 2003. Accepted November 2003.