Abstract
Ground slate technology is a trademark of circumpolar hunter-gatherers occupying coastal ecotones. However, a causal framework for explaining what drives the apparent adaptive success of slate technology is lacking. Attempting to remedy this, the current paper provides the first palaeodemographic and environmentally informed review of a maritime slate complex. Employing what is arguably the best documented and contextually controlled slate industry in Holocene Eurasia as a high-resolution case study (the Arctic Norwegian slate industry), the system components of demography, ecology and technology are integrated to get at (1) why slate technology appears to be a particular maritime success, (2) what causal contribution slate technology makes to population-scale adaptive success, (3) why slate technology was eventually abandoned. Based on extensive empirical investigations, the results demonstrate synchronous changes in population size, maritime intensification and the use of slate technologies. It is suggested that the mechanism responsible for this correspondence is that the slate industry facilitated a heightened adaptive success, reinforcing population growth and maritime intensification. Technological results indicate that superior properties for standardization make the slate technology ideal for establishing a scale economy in maritime resource exploitation when surpassing critical thresholds in population packing. Causal modelling demonstrates that, under particular demographic and ecological conditions, the scalar properties of slate technologies can offset high- and density-dependent start-up costs, by increasing return rates and reducing handling costs of hunting/processing of marine resources. Satisfying all criteria for tool “efficiency”, it is concluded that slate industries have causal efficacy as an “enabling technology” in circumpolar, maritime settings.
Highlights
This paper deals with two general issues in human behavioural ecology and evolutionary archaeology: 1. The role of adaptive strategies, mediated through technology, in shaping long-term population trajectories.2
I return to generalizable properties of slate technology by discussing three middle-range issues in consecutive order: 1) Why slate technology appears to be a particular maritime success? 2) What causal contribution slate technology makes to the population-scale adaptive success? 3) Why it became of less importance and was abandoned?
Based on a wide review and extensive empirical investigations, this paper demonstrates remarkable concomitant changes across multiple parameters in the human ecodynamics system of mid-Holocene Arctic Norway
Summary
This paper deals with two general issues in human behavioural ecology and evolutionary archaeology: 1. The role of adaptive strategies, mediated through technology, in shaping long-term population trajectories.2. Slate technology is a trademark of circumpolar hunter-gatherers occupying coastal ecotones. Slate technologies make the ideal case for comparative, human ecological research targeting the issues stated above. It was early on pointed out that slate technology seems to be a trademark of maritime hunter-gatherers in the circumpolar north Despite its diagnostic and culture-historical significance, Fennoscandian and Russian slate technology is generally poorly understood. This is in large part due to the low degree of archaeological activity in the Eurasian Arctic, combined with a scholarly preoccupation with flint and flint-like raw materials more comparable with the archaeological record of continental Europe
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