A Method of Searching Lithic Cores by Average Linkage Clustering

Stone tools are the main artifacts facilitating archaeological research of the Paleolithic era. The reassembly of stone tools is pretty meaningful for archaeological and anthropological research. According to the practice of reassembling stone tools, finding lithic cores is the best beginning part of reassembly. Meanwhile, for reassembly of mixed stone tools, the number of lithic cores determines the number of groups. However, several published reassembly methods are still hard to specify lithic cores automatically. Therefore, we propose a method for searching lithic cores automatically. Our method extracts features of stone tool models based on the segmented stone surfaces and geometric characteristics, and processes stone tool models by average group linkage clustering to search lithic core. The experiments conducted indicate that our method can find lithic cores successfully among mixed stone tool models.