Nineteenth century tools for twenty-first century archaeology? Why the Middle Paleolithic typology of Francois Bordes must be replaced

The artifact typology of Francois Bordes has been universally applied to Eu ropean Middle Paleolithic assemblages for the past half-century. Although i s utility as a common descriptive language is acknowledged, it is argued th at Bordes' type definitions are inadequate for use in modern quantitatively and technologically oriented studies of lithics because they are overly su bjective and are an uncontrolled mixture of technological and functional va riables acted on by raw material constraints. They also incorporate unteste d assumptions about the cognitive abilities of Middle Paleolithic hominids. This paper proposes to replace the Bordes typology with a method based on attribute combinations in which artifact descriptions will contain more beh aviorally significant information than is afforded by the current system.