Lowton's lithics, making sense of the Vickers flaked stone collection

• Main Author: Moulton, Anne L.
• Language: en_US
• Published: 2007
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/1993/1292

The Vickers Collection is a surface collection that contains over 1,494 flaked stone tools from the Lowton Site in southcentral Manitoba. It was donated to the University of Manitoba in 1963 by avocational archaeologist Chris Vickers. The goal of the study was to identify the raw materials used to make the tools, and to determine if the materials were from local or exotic locations. The study also identified which production technology was used to produce the tools, and confirmed tool identifications using use wear analysis. Comparison of the raw materials used among the projectile points, and between the bifacial and unifacial tools, indicates that both local and exotic materials were used in similar proportions. Most tools were manufactured from informal flake cores, with only 29% of the bifacial tools resulting from bifacial core reduction. In the use wear analysis, 40% of the tools in the examined sample were identified as scrapers, and another 42% had damage caused by agricultural plowing.