One of the methods of analysing the manufacturing process of lithic tools is by “reading” the scars of removals visible on the surface of cores or bifaces. The paper aims to review the limitations of this approach, by answering the question as to how much information from the original knapping process is still preserved in the cores and bifaces. To quantify the information loss we used experimentally knapped pieces, that we then refitted to check which removals are still visible on the surface of the analysed forms. We tested different measures of information loss in the context of removals and sequences of removals, but also the chronological relationship between sequences i.e. the number of linear extensions and missing nearest connections. On average, 39.9% of the original removals and 54.1% of the sequences of removals are preserved on the surface, but only 14.1% of the original relationships between sequences can be observed. Finally, we used simple machine learning to find an algorithm for estimating the loss of the nearest chronological relationships between sequences when no refits are available. Due to the extremely high information loss for the linear order of the knapping process we: a) propose to abandon these elements of the diacritic approach which aim to reconstruct the rhythms and schemes of knapping; b) evaluate the quality of the reconstructed knapping scheme (partial order) prior to further comparative analyses. Here we propose an algorithm to estimate the number of missing connections to test the quality of the knapping process while using diacritic schemes.

分析石器制造过程的方法之一是“读取”核心或双面表面上可见的去除痕迹。本文旨在通过回答原始敲击过程中仍有多少信息保留在核心和双面中的问题来回顾这种方法的局限性。为了量化信息损失，我们使用了实验性的敲击件，然后将其重新安装以检查在分析的表格表面上仍然可见哪些去除。我们在删除和删除序列的背景下测试了不同的信息丢失度量，还测试了序列之间的时间关系，即线性扩展和丢失最近连接的数量。平均而言，39.9%的原始去除和54.1%的去除序列被保留在表面上，但只能观察到14.1%的序列之间的原始关系。最后，我们使用简单的机器学习来找到一种算法，用于在没有可用的改装时估计序列之间最近的时间顺序关系的损失。由于敲击过程的线性顺序的信息损失极高，我们：a）建议放弃旨在重建敲击节奏和方案的变音符号方法的这些元素；b) 在进一步比较分析之前评估重构的敲击方案（偏序）的质量。在这里，我们提出了一种算法来估计丢失连接的数量，以在使用变音符号方案时测试敲击过程的质量。