Untangling tangs: Implications of tanged stone tool morphologies for hafting and raw material use in the Palaeolithic

Tanged tools are the most obvious typological hint of stone tool hafting in the Palaeolithic record. As a result, their appearance has been viewed as the advent of tool hafting, and tangs in younger assemblages are often taken as a sign of technological change. Despite these assumptions, the implications of tanged morphologies for hafting, overall tool design, and raw material use are only starting to become addressed in functional studies. Meanwhile the significance of morphological and technological variability among tangs from different periods has received little attention. We discuss this aspect by presenting new results on Aterian and Early Gravettian tanged tools. Our data comes from the work done on the assemblages from the rock shelter Ifri n’Ammar (Morocco, 171 000–80 000 BP) and the open-air site Maisières-Canal (Belgium, 28 000 BP). We tested different hafting alternatives for the tanged tools and used them in tasks identified in the archaeological assemblages. On the basis of these results, we argue that despite their superficial similarity, differ-ent tangs require different approaches to haft material selection and tool design, and their novelty and specificity as technological innovations can only be evaluated when these aspects are well un-derstood and the tangs placed in the broader context of morphological adaptations for hafting. The evidence of hafting on non-tanged tools from Palaeolithic sites clearly demonstrates that tool morphology can be adjusted for hafting in a variety of ways, few of which are macroscopically as visible as the tang. This calls for a need to view lithic assemblages as dynamic wholes where tool shapes are controlled by lithic and organic raw material strategies as well as learned and shared ways of tool production.