Lithic refitting and its implication for the integrity and duration of site occupation: The case of the Late Upper Paleolithic site of Kiusu-5 in Hokkaido, Northern Japan

This paper presents several production sequence refits from the Late Upper Paleolithic site of Kiusu-5 in Hokkaido, Northern Japan, and discusses these refits as potentially important sources of information about the transportation as well as discarding of stone tools and blanks. A few refits show that reduction sequences were involved in the production of flakes, elongated flakes, and blades, and their modification as well as discarding, allow us to infer their stage in the production-use-discard cycle. Furthermore, many refits illustrate that the sets of formal tools (particularly in endscrapers) not accompanied by manufacturing debris were imported into the site and discarded at that spot. Both patterns of the refits from the Kiusu-5 site may indicate the occurrence of the task-specific activity and the relatively short duration of the occupation of the site.