The Costs and Benefits of Technological Organization: Hunter-Gatherer Lithic Industries and Beyond

Abstract

Technological organization (TO) is decades old but remains ill-defined and underspecified. Broadly, TO denotes the effects of cultural and adaptive context upon the size and character of tool assemblages. Chapters in this volume reveal TO as a productive approach to the study of hunter-gatherer lithic technologies. Yet TO remains burdened with self-imposed limitations. It must be expanded in scope and applications, in lithics beyond tools, in materials generally beyond lithics, in causes beyond narrow adaptation, and in subjects beyond hunter-gatherers. TO is applied as a set of narrative interpretive tropes. To improve its practice, TO must treat curation as a continuous variable not categorical state, assimilate the time-averaged quality of assemblages as accumulations, reconcile the synchronic behavior it explains with the diachronic accumulations it analyzes, accommodate history as well as adaptation, and transform itself from narrative device to a body of specified, predictive theory. The high quality of chapters at once catalogues the current state and highest expression of TO as interpretive craft and reveals the inherent limitations of that use. Building from this collection, the challenge is to forge the systematic theory that will transform TO into a deductive science.