Planning > By author > Francesca Romagnoli

In the last decades, the improvement of technological and functional approach applied to malacological remains has shown the potential of the study of shell tools and opened new perspectives for the characterisation of techno-economic, social and territorial aspects of prehistoric communities. Although in the last years several pioneer researches allowed setting methodological basis for the development of the study of shell tools, taphonomic bias is still few understood. The ArchaeoENHANCE project, developed within the International Research Network of Taphen (CNRS), provides to realise a 4-years experimental protocol to improve the methodological study of shell tools obtaining a systemic comprehension of the malacological collections in archaeological contexts, especially focusing on taphonomic point of view in macro and microscopic analysis. We present the experimental protocol we have developed and preliminary results of the macro and microscopic analysis of used and unused shells, at the beginning of the project.