A pan-European dataset revealing variability in lithic technology, toolkits, and artefact shapes ~15-11 kya

Comparative macro-archaeological investigations of the human deep past rely on the availability of unified, quality-checked datasets integrating different layers of observation. Information on the durable and ubiquitous record of Paleolithic stone artefacts and technological choices are especially pertinent to this endeavour. We here present a large expert-sourced collaborative dataset for the study of stone tool technology and artefact shape evolution across Europe between ~15.000 and 11.000 years before present. the dataset contains a compendium of key sites from the study period, and data onlithic technology and toolkit composition at the level of the cultural taxa represented by those sites.The dataset further encompasses 2D shapes of selected lithic artefact groups (armatures, endscrapers,and borers/perforators) shared between cultural taxa. These data offer novel possibilities to explorebetween-regional patterns of material culture change to reveal scale-dependent processes of long-termtechnological evolution in mobile hunter-gatherer societies at the end of the Pleistocene. Our datasetfacilitates state-of-the-art quantitative analyses and showcases the benefits of collaborative datacollation and synthesis.