Lauren Franklin

PhD Student
Lauren Franklin
lfranklin@arizona.edu

About Lauren Franklin

I am an archaeologist interested in the evolution and cultural transmission of human technological and social behavior. I study Pleistocene and Early Holocene stone tool technologies from the Levant, Western Europe, and North America. I incorporate three dimensional analysis and modeling of stone tools to study technological variability and identify tool making lineages. 

Selected Publications

Franklin, Lauren M. & Jay D. Franklin (2025). Poor Acorn Being Theorized: forager land-use strategies on the Upper Cumberland Plateau, Tennessee. Journal of Anthropological Archaeology. In preparation.

Franklin, Lauren M. Continuity for a Change: trends in lithic technological continuity and variation from the Lower to Middle Paleolithic at Tabun Cave. In preparation.

Hurst, Stance, Lauren Franklin, and Eileen Johnson (2024). Assessment of Apple’s Object Capture Photogrammetry API for Rapidly Creating Research Quality Cultural Heritage 3D Models. PLoS ONE 19(12) e0314560. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0314560

Tune, Jesse, Jay D. Franklin and Lauren M. Franklin (2022). The First Tennesseans: A Review of the Last 20 Years, 1996-2016 in The American Southeast at the End of the Ice Age, edited by D. Shane Miller, Ashley M. Smallwood, and Jesse W. Tune, pp. 161-170. University of Alabama Press.

Franklin, Lauren M., and Steven L. Kuhn (2021). Scraper blank morphology and artifact use-life in the Acheulo-Yabrudian of Tabun Cave, Israel. Journal of Paleolithic Archaeology 4(3). https://doi.org/10.1007/s41982-021-00100-w 

Projects

Tabun Cave analysis and publication (PhD dissertation)

3D Modelling and Geometric Morphometric analysis of artifacts (with Stance Hurst)

Gravettian Truncated Element analysis (with Jay D. Franklin, Jean-Philippe Rigaud, and Jan Simek)

Transitional Pleistocene/Early Holocene stone tool research and publications (with Jay D. Franklin and Jesse Tune)

Research Interests

lithic technology, cultural transmission, human evolution, 3-D artifact analysis and modeling, Pleistocene and Early Holocene hunter-gatherer ecology, paleoenvironments