Shoop Site Scrapers: Edge Wear Analysis of Flint Stone Scraper Tools

Dynisha Gamble, Grade 8,  won a First Place at the Londonderry School’s 2001 Science Consortium Sceince and Engineering Fair . She will be competing at the Capital Area Science and Engineering Fair at Dickinson College on March 19^th. She has also been asked to present her research with Dr. Kurt W. Carr, State Archaeologist from the Bureau for Historic Preservation, Pennsylvania Historical & Museum Commission, at the Society for Pennsylvania Archaeology annual meeting, Stroudsburg, Pennsylvania,  May 2001. Dynisha has been working on this project for 2 years. She is trying to determine what happened at an Archaeological Site 15,000 years ago. The site is just North of Harrisburg in the mountains near Dauphin.  Along with the Archaeologist she has been working with, she believes that prehistoric Native Americans were hunting a large herd of Caribou in those mountains. Working on the theory that Paleo Indians  ambushed the animal herd as they came through the hills, this experiment will find evidence indicating  the occupants of the Shoop Site  cleaned the hides from the hunted caribou with the flint stone scraper tools she has been studying. By looking at the at wear on edges of the stone tools, she hopes to determine how they were used 15,000 years ago.

Screen shot from the imaging software, ScionImage, used in the analysis of the stone tool. For more information on the Freeware contact Scion Corp.

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