Approaches to style in lithic archaeology

Abstract

A key issue in lithic archaeology is how to identify the respective roles played by ethnicity and activity—that is, style and function—in the formal variation exhibited by stone tools. This paper argues that style is most profitably regarded as the ethnic idiom imparted to lithic technology in each and all of its aspects due to the culture-historical context of its manufacture and employment. Style is thus a full complement of function, and it is to be looked for wherever artisans encounter options of form and use to “choose” from in pursuing a given task. Because it equates ethnicity with functionally equivalent choice, this is labeled the isochrestic approach to style. Contrasted to this is the iconological approach, which restricts style solely to those aspects of formal variation that artisans purposefully invest with symbolic content reflecting self-conscious social groups. Pottery decoration appears to reveal such investment and therefore ceramic sociology is a feasible enterprise. However, a parallel iconological approach to stone tools is much less promising. At least as it is exemplified by the writings of Lewis Binford, lithic sociology would seem to have little substantive grounding in the relevant empirical data, to be argued within what may be an unsound theoretical frame (including the distinction between curative and expedient technologies), and in any case to resist translation into a workable analytic machinery. Not least among the reasons for this last is the fact that stone tools do not possess formal variation wherein iconologically significant investment can be objectively identified and defined. The archaeological frame of reference within which the isochrestic and iconological approaches are discussed is largely contributed by the classic Paleolithic sequence of the Perigord region of southwestern France.