Book Review: Works in Stone: Contemporary Perspectives on Lithic Analysis (original) (raw)
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Lithic Technology, 2022
This paper asks why we expect to find standardization among prehistoric stone tools. It argues this expectation results from early archaeologists' experience living in industrialized societies, a wild mismatch with the world their Pleistocene forebears inhabited. It further argues that in searching for evidence of lithic standardization, archaeologists must be alert for "mirages," things that can create the illusion of standardization. Pre-industrial lithic standardization seems most likely to have emerged from attaching stone tools to handles ("hafting"), and from using stone tools as "passive lithic social media."
Journal of Historical Archaeology and Anthropological Sciences, 2024
The production of flint tools evolved and diversified in response to the increasing and newly appearing demands of the early societies. The maintenance of this tradition coupled with the durability of stone tools resulted in the development of the lithic tool kit and the accumulation of large lithic assemblages mainly in settlements. The twentieth century witnessed the wide investigation of those assemblages through techno-typological approaches that aim at classifying and interpreting lithic assemblages and using them to reconstruct the chronological and cultural phases of given societies. The wide use of stone tools in daily-life activities i.e. hunting, gathering, farming, and food processing, enhanced the perception of lithics as functional objects that are mainly associated with secular activities. However, investigating the changing roles of stone tools over time remained partially overlooked. Apart from finely-made flint knives, the ritual functions of stone tools remain an unexplored research area. The current paper focuses on assessing the symbolic roles of the Predynastic lithics based on their use as grave goods. The results show that varied classes of tools were recruited for funerary purposes and that the evolving roles of lithics were influenced by a long process of human-nature and people-object interactions.
Analysis of an ethnological grinding tool: what to do with archaeological artefacts?
2005
This paper aims to offer an alternative approach to conventional (and often even non-existent) studies o f m acrolithic or ground stone tools found in archaeological contexts. The analysis o f a unique artefact, a "mano", from an ethnographic context (Dogon country, Mali), is used to develop a methodological model for the daily archaeological research o f this type o f material. From the standpoint that labour processes (which are materialised in archaeology mainly as tools and finished products) are the key elem ents in the understanding o f prehistoric societies, we propose a methodology which integrates use-wear analysis (addressing the participation o f the tool in the productive cycle) and residue analysis (allowing an understanding o f the processed good). The combination o f both techniques should allow us to make evident a series o f materials and working processes that have hardly been documented in the archaeological record until now, or even remain unknown.
Stone Tools in Ethnoarchaeological Contexts: Theoretical-Methodological INFERENCES1
2007
We present a critical review of the use which ethnological data has been used for the study of prehistoric societies and stone tools. In this sense, we note the uselessness of fonnal ethnographic analogies, in view of their incapacity to generate explanations for the causality of lithic assemblages. In this way, we claim a new fonnulation of ethnoarchaeological research, focused on developing an archaeological methodology confonning to the study of the socio-economic dynamics of prehistoric societies. Thus, the ethnoarchaeological research we are developing with hunter-gatherers societies from the Tierra del Fuego archipelago (Argentina) pennit us to corroborate the lack of social significance of the morphological and technological categories that have been typically used in lithic analyses. It is for this reason that we propose different analytic categories which allow us to detenninate the goals of lithic production and, at the same time, to reconstruct and characterize developed ...
In Anderson, P. C., Cheval, C., Durand, A. Regards croisés sur les outils liés au travail des végétaux. An interdisciplinary focus on plant-working tools. XXXIIIe rencontres internationales d’archéologie et d’histoire d’Antibes, Éditions APDCA, Antibes.