Prehistoric India to 1000 B.C. c9.12

c9.12

Against this natural background of changing climatic phases in Asia and Europe we can trace certain important major groupings of tool types, which presumably represent a similar grouping of human traditions or techniques. While the process of fracturing or flaking stone into the shape required for a specific purpose - cutting or cleaving, for instance - has certain basic principles in common wherever such manufacture is carried out, yet nevertheless there is some indication that within certain large geographical areas there was a preference, if nothing more, for characteristic techniques throughout the Lower Palaeolithic. The primary ivision of techniques, suggested by archaeologists when the possibility of making these major groupings was first envisaged, was into *core* and *flake* tools. In the former group, a tool is made by flaking or chipping away from a parent block until the resultant form is satisfactory - a principle broadly analogous to sculpture. In flake tools, however, the first process is to detach a large flake from a block of stone and then to work this into the finished tool. The production of core tools naturally produced flakes in the very process of manufacture, and these were in turn often made into tools, but there is always a very high preponderance of tools made from the core. In the flake industries, on the other hand, the core technique appears only when contact with true core-tool cultures can be traced.