[2] While a graduate student in the late 1970s, Dibble excavated with the French prehistorian François Bordes at the site of Pech de l'Azé IV in Carsac-Aillac, France, with whom he developed a strong mentoring relationship[citation needed].
The majority of Dibble's archaeological work was centered around Neandertals and early modern humans in Western Eurasia, and more particularly on the stone tools which are thought to have been the primary mode of their material culture.
In addition to his excavation work, he has maintained a skeptical view of symbolism in the Middle Paleolithic, on which he has published several articles, and he has strongly advocated quantitative methods in archaeology.
the use of GIS and total stations in excavations and has worked to quantify the understanding of stone tool manufacture via reproductive experiments[citation needed].
[3] Dibble's most-cited[4] contribution to archaeological thought is commonly known as scraper reduction, built off of ideas first developed by Jelinek and George Carr Frison.
Dibble's theory, by implying that stone tools as discovered by archaeologists are the result of a constant process of use and reuse and that what is excavated is often at the end of a long and complicated use-life, forced a reexamination of the entire debate.
[citation needed] Dibble was director or co-director of three projects: excavations at the cave of Roc de Marsal [fr; es],[5] Campagne, Dordogne, France from 2004 to 2010; excavations at the Grotte des Contrabandiers (Smugglers' Cave)[6] in Témara, Morocco in 2006; and the Abydos Survey for Paleolithic Sites[7] in the high desert surrounding Abydos, Egypt from 2000 to 2007.
Their system has been adopted by a number of other excavators throughout North America, Europe and Africa[citation needed], and they published extensively on these methods.