Profiling prehistoric artefacts (stone tools) that were used to process daily staple foods 40,000 years ago

Abstract

The overarching motivation of the project is titled “Stone Tools as Storytellers: Experiencing Information from Museum Objects” and this project is spearheaded by Professor Laura Longo and fellow co-collaborator Professor Biju Dhanapalan, both established Associate Professors from the School of Arts, Design and Media. The outline of this project is to converge STEAMED (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics, Education, and Design) research and the humanities to narrate and story tell using interactive visualisations, the data retrieved from the museum objects. Profiling grinding stone tools was a pilot study to determine a reproducible protocol of collection of data from said museum objects and coming up with an organized and efficient methodology in collecting qualitative and quantitative data. In this pilot study, river stones are used in place of real museum objects, to be used in the grinding experiments. Dried ginger, tuypha and acorn are the worked materials used. The qualitative and quantitative data that were collected were duration, intensity (contact force), weight of worked materials before and after and the comparative surface analysis. In order to determine contact force, a force sensor platform had to be built and this was done using a Force Sensor Resistor (Part No. 406), Arduino and Processing software. The data collected served as a mean of better understanding the method of processing food by pre-industrial societies as well as the potential of relevance to understanding better the social organization and economic of past societies done through functional analysis.