An experiment reported by Cook et al. (2017) demonstrated
that there was a strong morphological similarity
between a stone used to crack open California sea
mussels and archaeological
pitted stones. Based on these
findings, the authors concluded that the primary function
of pitted stones was to process mussels. The use of pitted
stones to crack open turban snails was also suspected
but was not evaluated experimentally. Here we report
the results of an experiment in which we processed 572
turban snails using two flat, fist-sized cobbles, one as a
hammer and the other as an anvil. As in the Cook et al.
(2017) study, we found that cracking open these mollusks
also produced a pitted morphology on the anvil stone
virtually identical to that of archaeological pitted stones.
From this, we conclude that pitted stones were almost
certainly used to crack open turban snails as well as
mussels along the central coast of California.