The Acheulean Handaxe at Boxgrove

I stepped out of my comfortable arena of New World, Paleoindian archaeology and into the Old World Paleolithic with my first paper on the Acheulean Handaxe in 2006. There I wrote: The Lower Paleolithic researchers who believe the Acheulean handaxe was the desired product do not find their justification in its function, since its function is not understood … Instead, they find their justification in its unchanging morphology. For a million plus years, its basic shape remained constant as it spread across three continents. I further pointed out that this desired-product belief can be traced back to the end of the eighteenth century and John Frere. Then I proposed a different belief, which was the handaxe was actually only the by-product and flakes were the desired-product. The remainder of the paper was then justification for that belief from a morphological perspective. Since writing that first paper I have had numerous discussions with colleagues about this dichotomy of the desired-product versus by-product. I have discovered that the opinions on the subject are quite strong. Often, it was suggested that I read the Boxgrove literature and this might convince me to change my mind. So I read Boxgrove: A Middle Pleistocene hominid sit