How Rocks Die: Changing Patterns of Discard and Re-Use of Ground Stone Tools in Middle Bronze Age Cyprus

Andrew Mccarthy

doi:10.3390/su12218869

Abstract

Cultural objects are thought to have a lifespan. From selection, through construction, use, destruction, and discard, materials do not normally last forever, transforming through stages of life, eventually leading to their death. The materiality of stone objects, however, can defy the inevitable demise of an object, especially durable ground stone tools that can outlive generations of human lifespans. How groups of people deal with the relative permanence of stone tools depends on their own relationship with the past, and whether they venerate it or reject its influence on the present. A case study from the long-lived site of Prasteio-Mesorotsos in Cyprus demonstrates a shifting attitude toward ground stone objects, from the socially conservative habit of ritually killing of objects and burying them, to one of more casual re-use and reinterpretation of ground stone. This shift in attitude coincides with a socio-political change that eventually led to the ultimate rejection of the past: complete abandonment of the settlement.

Highlights

We have learned from Leroi-Gourhan [1], Lemmonier [2], and others [3] that objects have lifespans, but what about objects whose material qualities make them immortal? While stone tools certainly undergo transformations in the stages of chaîne opératoire, they are extremely durable
Many ancient cultures relied upon knowledge of stone properties for survival, so it can be assumed that they understood their relative permanence, especially of stones selected for long periods of use
Did a group see discarded stone tools, broken or unbroken, as objects of respect, mnemonic links to ancestors, or trash that can be reused as a resource, unbound by sentimentality? Was their attitude somewhere in between? This paper challenges the purely utilitarian explanation of ground stone tool discard by explicitly acknowledging what the ancient users of these tools would have understood: the materiality of stone is permanence, but the attitude of people toward the concept of permanence is something that is culturally fluid

Summary

Introduction

We have learned from Leroi-Gourhan [1], Lemmonier [2], and others [3] that objects have lifespans, but what about objects whose material qualities make them immortal? While stone tools certainly undergo transformations in the stages of chaîne opératoire, they are extremely durable. What was once considered a cultural “backwater,” Cyprus has in more recent decades been acknowledged to have been on a different social trajectory than the mainland, deliberately rejecting complex state level society and urbanization for a time in favour of retaining small scale egalitarianism. This began to change at some point in the Late Chalcolithic/Bronze Age, and by the second half of the 2nd millennium BC, Cyprus was on its way to becoming a major player in the Late Bronze Age Mediterranean system, perhaps due to its access to abundant metal resources [7,8,9]. Because stone tools are used in every period and they are so-long lived, the use, discard and re-use patterns in their contexts can tell us something about the relationship between the materiality of stone and the attitudes toward maintaining the status quo

Materiality of Stone

Neolithic Establishment

Chalcolithic Conservatism

Middle Bronze Age Revolution

Death of Stones

Conclusions