Taphonomic studies have been carried out by creating sites. Stone tool replicas and debitage are buried along with bone fragments to simulate a site. The position of each lithic and bone fragment is carefully recorded. These simulated sites are often created so that they are trampled on and undergo various post depositional effects. One example was a square metre which was created to simulate a portion of the site of Klithi in northern Greece. The simulated site was positioned along the path leading to the site so that it was regularly walked upon by diggers going to and from the site. It was also 'trampled' by the regular passing of goat herds along the valley.
After a period of time the simulated site was excavated and the position of the artifacts recorded. Comparisons can then be made between the original position of the artifacts and where they may have moved to giving information about taphonomic changes that may take place on a site.​ also see Barton, R. and Bergman, C. 1982.


Other taphonomic studies have involve placing stone tools in rivers to investigate how they might be transported by fluvial action. A note of caution on such experiments. A number of used flakes that were place in a small stream in order to investigate post depositional effects on flint surfaces in connection with use-wear studies. disappeared after only a few months. Either having been washed away or buried in the silt of the stream bed. To alleviate this problem some experimenters have painted the lithics a bight colour in order to facilitate the recover of the lithics. of course this not feasible with experiments concerned with use-wear analysis where the intent is to carry out microscopic analysis on the recovered lithics.​
Experiments involving the burial of flints have been carried out to investigate the potential survival of organic residues on stone tools.


In the paper by Cattaneo et al 1993, experiments were carried out by putting blood on lithics and burying them. Of 10 scrapers and 10 flakes only 1 scraper tested positive for albumin content after a year and some tested negative after burial for only one month. The investigators suggest that very specific conditions are required for residues to survive on stone tools,"... a combination of behavioural and taphonomic factors will be necessary for preservation. We suggest that amongst these may be: intensive blood letting, meat-cutting or bone/skin scraping at the use-sites; artifacts with numerous flake scars to catch and preserve fragmentary residues; good preservation of residues before the tool was lost or discarded, for instance under handle, in leather bags, or within bone where the knife or arrowhead has jammed; a suitable soil matrix; and reasonable protection from the elements." (Cattaneo et al 1993, 41).


Further experiments have been carried out with even less optimistic results. The authors concluded that, "...it is apparent that immunologically meaningful residues did not survive on stone tools tested from archaeological sites or from simulated archaeological contexts. Even under conditions of unusual dryness blood showed degradation in less than a year." (Eisele et al 1995,44). Following their conclusions they state that, "The claims of Loy and co-workers (Loy et al. 1990, Loy and Hardy 1992) to have detected human immunoglobin in 20,000-year-old and 90,000-year-old samples by use of gold conjugated Protein A are extremely unlikely in view of the fact that Cattaneo et al 1993 and the present study have found immune-globulin does not survive even a few months." (Eisele et al 1995,45).