Particle size distribution: An experimental study using southern African reduction methods and raw materials De la Peña Alonso, Paloma Thomas, Marc Molefyane, Tumelo R. Funding: Regarding the funding, I (Paloma de la Peña) received operational support funding from the Center of Excellence in Paleosciences –National Research Foundation of South Africa for travel expenses. I also received a Pouroulis Family Foundation Fellowship in African Quaternary Archaeology and Hominin Palaeoecology at the University of Cambridge, which contributed to half of my salary during the research and writing process of this manuscript. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript. Acknowledgments Paloma de la Peña has a Ramón y Cajal Research contract (RYC2020-029506-I) at the Universidad de Granada (Spain) funded by European social fund and the Agencia Estatal de Investigación (Spain). We thank Gary Trower and Ben Maclennan for indicating to us raw material outcrops and providing us with some of the raw material we used in our knapping experiments. Our thanks also go to Lucinda Backwell, Tammy Hodgskiss, Matt Caruana and Matt Lotter, whose reading and correction of the article were very valuable. We experimentally created a particle size dataset that is based on reduction sequences and raw materials typical of the Middle and Later Stone Age in southern Africa. The reason for creating this new dataset is that current particle size frameworks are based, almost exclusively, on flint and western European knapping methods. We produced the dataset using knapping methods and raw materials frequently encountered in the southern African archaeological record because we wanted to test whether it has the same distribution as particle size datasets experimentally created in Europe, and to initialise the production of a database for use in the analysis of lithic assemblages from southern African Late Pleistocene deposits. We reduced 117 cores of quartz, quartzite, jasper, chalcedony, hornfels, and rhyolite. The knapping methods selected were unidirectional, discoidal, Levallois recurrent and bipolar flaking. In this article we compare this new particle size distribution dataset with the results obtained from previous experiments. We found that the southern African dataset shows a wider size range distribution, which seems to be explained by differences in knapping methods and raw materials. Our results show that there is overlap between the distribution of the southern African experimental knapping dataset and the sorting experiment conducted by Lenoble on flint artefacts in a runoff context. This article shows that a particle size analysis is not sufficient on its own to assess the perturbation of an archaeological assemblage and must be coupled with other analytical tools. 2023-02-14T09:58:12Z 2023-02-14T09:58:12Z 2022-12-30 info:eu-repo/semantics/article de la Peña P, Thomas M, Molefyane TR (2022) Particle size distribution: An experimental study using southern African reduction methods and raw materials. PLoS ONE 17(12): e0278867. [https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0278867] https://hdl.handle.net/10481/79917 10.1371/journal.pone.0278867 eng http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess Atribución 4.0 Internacional Public Library of Science