Use-wear analysis of the late Middle Pleistocene quartzite assemblage from the Gran Dolina site, TD10.1 subunit (Sierra de Atapuerca, Spain)

Quartzite has been poorly studied from a functional point of view since the foundation of use-wear analysis, as the method was largely built upon the observation of wear on fine-grained raw materials (e.g., chert). In the case of the Middle Pleistocene Gran Dolina-TD10.1 site in Spain (ca. 300 kya), the sole raw material that can provide functional information for the artifacts used by the human occupants of the site is quartzite. A sample of 51 quartzite artifacts was mainly analyzed with scanning electron microscopy, and functional interpretation was possible for 36 of them. The activities identified were mostly connected to the butchering of animals, but bone and hide scraping as well as woodworking were also present. The performance of activities other than butchering supports the idea that the site was used as a residential camp during the deposition of the basal part of the TD10.1 subunit (Lower-TD10.1). This study demonstrates the possibility of obtaining functional data from relatively ancient artifacts made of a coarse-grained lithology. Considering that metamorphic quartzose materials often dominate Early and Middle Pleistocene lithic assemblages all over the world, the standardization of the functional reading of quartzite will allow acquiring countless functional data with which to reconstruct ancient human behavior.