One, Two, and Three: How to Count the Real Number of Archaeological Chipped Stones? An Experimental Investigation on the Counting Methods of Fragmentary Chipped Stones

Chipped stones, like many other archaeological artifacts, change in their original context. One of the most important changes is breakage. Although it is clear that chipped stones which are gathered by archaeologists might have been broken, there have been few discussions made on the estimating the original number of chipped stones before breaking. In this article we have introduced different methods of counting broken fragments of chipped stones when refitting is impossible. Seven different assemblages of chipped stones have been experimentally broken and their fragments have been counted by using different methods in order to find the competible methods to count fragments of chipped stones in an archaeological assemblages.