Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology

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.