SHORT LITHIC REDUCTION IN THE ITAPEVA ROCKSHELTER, SÃO PAULO, BRAZIL

The Itapeva Shelter is located to the southeast ofS & atilde;o Paulo, Brazil. Initially, the lithic industry was identified as what is known as lithic expediency within North American literature. To test this hypothesis, the physical attributes of the raw materials and the technical attributes of the archeological material were cross referenced with the aim of creating clusters, and Student's t-test and Multi-dimensional Scaling (cMDS) were used to statistically verify whether there were organized reduction sequences within the industry. The conclusion is that there are debitage processes that are detectable through statistical analysis, which are not short, random knapping sequences. This suggests that refined statistical tests are capable of detecting the standardized reduction that connects a series of knapping methods in raw materials of variable quality, with no drop in technical execution in the middle and recent Holocene based on random knapping.