Abstract
Building on the body of work regarding the concepts of invention and innovation in lithic technology, we further explore the give-and-take relationship between people and their technologies in two different stone point knapping traditions. From the socio-technical framework perspective, which is one amongst many ways to look at technological trends, the acceptance and stabilisation of a tool-making tradition is not only dictated by its technology-specific properties, such as its ingenuity or usefulness. Instead, it also depends on the social conventions and practices of its spatiotemporal context, which can be explored through the notions of introduction, closure, stabilisation, destabilisation and copying. We explain the theory behind the socio-technical framework with modern examples, such as bicycle use in late nineteenth century England and electrical guitar trends in the last half of the twentieth century. Turning our attention to stone point knapping, we use Australian Kimberley point production during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bridge into how the socio-technical framework reflects in the dynamics that might be involved in lithic traditions. Using this theoretical framework to think about aspects of deep-time point production, such as that recorded from the Still Bay techno-complex during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa, becomes trickier though. Instead of reliable ethno-historical accounts or dense archaeological context, we have to rely on coarse-grained data sets about distribution, age, environment and population, making inferences more speculative and less testable. In the context of this special volume, we suggest, however, that a socio-technical framework approach may be a useful tool to enhance our thinking about dynamics in ancient techno-behaviours and that more work is necessary to flesh out its potential in this respect.
Highlights
A socio-technical framework structures interaction among members of social groups and shapes their thinking and acting towards a technological development
We have previously argued that technological similarities and variation in Still Bay point production might indicate broadly shared, as well as locally constrained, Table 2 Phases in the socio-technical framework and predictions that can be made about the manifestation of material evidence in relation to Still Bay point production
Often neglected as part of the Still Bay, is one of five strategies we previously identified associated with Still Bay point assemblages
Summary
A socio-technical framework structures interaction among members of social groups and shapes their thinking and acting towards a technological development. The new elongated glass point technology was rejected, because they were seen as inferior in hunting and fighting compared to points manufactured from specific stones that were linked conventionally to manly power and efficiency In this setting, stone had a socio-technical prestige that glass lacked (Harrison 2002, 2007). The technology had come to a new, and apparent long-lasting, material closure as typological definitions in academic writing, permanent museum exhibitions and as objects in museum storage with linked information in accession catalogues What this example shows is that over a few decades points were transformed from a product of deep tradition to a concept—Kimberley points—that included artefacts with new, very different qualities compared to before. Such increased residential mobility could explain how a smaller population may be able to interact across a larger landscape
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