Abstract
The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. This analytical focus on technological and morphological appearance is one of the characteristics of the conventional approach for constructing inferences from this record. An equally persistent routine involves ascribing the emerged patterns and variability within the archaeological deposits directly to long-term central tendencies in human actions and cultural transmission. Here we re-evaluate this conventional approach. By invoking some of the known concerns and concepts about the formation of archaeological record, we introduce notions of aggregates and formational emergence to expand on the understanding of how artifacts accumulate, what these accumulations represent, and how the patterns and variability among them emerge. To infer behavior that could inform on past lifeways, we further promote a shift in the focus of analysis from the technological and morphological appearance of artifacts and assemblages to the practice of stone use. We argue for a more rigorous and multi-level inferential procedure in modeling behavioral adaptation and evolution.
Highlights
Inferring behavior with potentially adaptive significance from the stone artifact record has been a major challenge in our field from its inception
For inferring the behavior that could be used to inform on past lifeways, we suggest a shift from the analysis of technological and morphological appearance of assemblages using imposed categories of predefined meaning to an analysis that focuses on modeled practice of stone use
The conceptualization of how stone artifacts accumulate and how patterns and variability emerge as outlined above incites the need to rethink the connection between the current appearance of the stone artifact record and behavioral evolution
Summary
Inferring behavior with potentially adaptive significance from the stone artifact record has been a major challenge in our field from its inception. The use of the term “time-averaging” in our field often results in a misleading understanding that a group of stone artifacts represents a typical behavior or strategy (in stone tool making, mobility, place use, etc.) over the time it took for the group to accumulate Such an understanding of measured properties of assemblage as reflecting central tendency in behavior a priori precludes us from thinking about those properties as an emergent effect of variability in behavior and natural agents. Our contention here is that, similar to these examples, the variability in the artifact composition of aggregates, and the properties measured therein, do not derive from an average or a sum of related actions of human individuals Instead, these emerge through the interaction of a variety of anthropogenic and natural processes operating over different times and spaces (see Hodder 2012; Latour 2005; Martin 2013).. We mean the combination and interrelationship of selecting, flaking, transporting, reusing, maintaining, discarding, etc., inferred from emergent properties at different scales of time and space
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