Putting what's broken back together again

Archaeologists rarely find complete examples of the things from the past that they study. They find instead the broken, discarded and often widely strewn and fragmented remains of once complete objects. Putting these things back together again, when possible, is difficult, requires persons with special skill sets, and is time consuming. Thus while the insights gained from studying whole objects is often significant, mostly archaeologists have learned to work with assemblages of fragmented remains. Here I will mainly consider the challenges and potentials of putting stone artefacts back together. Stone has the quality of being incredibly durable and ubiquitous in space and time since its first use over 2.5 million years ago. It also has the unique property that the breaking of the material (known as knapping) is the actual behavior we want to reconstruct. Thus refitting the pieces in this case tells us much more than what it looked like at the start. It tells us what people did and to what ends. I will discuss some examples of the challenges and rewards of refitting stone and why stone might be suitable for automated, statistical or mathematical approaches. I will also present an independent research program to simulate knapping that may offer a data set also suitable for testing automated approaches to putting stones back together.