Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1607328909 ISBN 13: 9781607328902

Publisher: University Press of Colorado, 2019

Synopsis

Lithic Technologies in SedentarySocieties examines lithic technology from ancient societies in Mesoamerica, the Near East, South Asia, and North America, showcasing the important contributions in-depth lithic analysis can make to the study of sedentary societies around the world. Using cutting-edge analytical techniques these case studies address difficult anthropological questions concerning economic, social, and political issues, as well as global trends in lithic production.   Lithic analysis focused on sedentary societies, especially in places like Mesoamerica, has previously been neglected mostly because of the high frequency of informal tools, but such bias limits the ways in which both lithic production and economic organization are investigated. Bringing the importance of studying such technologies to the fore and emphasizing the vital anthropological questions that lithics can answer, Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies is a valuable resource for scholars and students of lithic technology and sedentary, complex societies.    Contributors: Fumi Arakawa, Mary A. Davis, James Enloe, Dan Healan, Francesca Manclossi, Theodore Marks, Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Jason S. R. Paling, Steve Rosen, John Whittaker

About this title

About the Author

Rachel A. Horowitz is a lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Appalachian State University. Her research interests include lithic technology, technological organization, economic organization, and the Maya. Her work has been published in several journals and edited volumes including American Antiquity, Paleoanthropology, Journal of Field Archaeology, and Journal of Archaeological Sciences: Reports.   Grant S. McCall is executive director of the Center for Human-Environmental Research and associate professor in the Department of Anthropology at Tulane University. His research interests include stone tool technology, human evolution, rock art research, hunter-gatherer ethnology, African prehistory, and political philosophy. He is also the editor of Lithic Technology.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Lithic Technologies in Sedentary Societies

By Rachel A. Horowitz, Grant S. McCall

University Press of Colorado

Copyright © 2019 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-60732-890-2

Contents

List of Figures, 
List of Tables, 
Acknowledgments, 
1. Lithics in Sedentary Societies: Themes, Methods, and Directions Rachel A. Horowitz and Grant S. McCall, 
2. Urban Lithics: The Role of Stone Tools in the Indus Civilization and at Harappa Mary A. Davis, 
3. The Importance of Being Ad Hoc: Patterns and Implications of Expedient Lithic Production in the Bronze Age in Israel Francesca Manclossi and Steven A Rosen, 
4. Leaving No Stone Unturned: Expedient Lithic Production among Preclassic Households of San Estevan, Belize, and K'o and Hamontún, Guatemala Jason S.R. Paling, 
5. The Economic Organization of the Extraction and Production of Utilitarian Chert Tools in the Mopan Valley, Belize Rachel A. Horowitz, 
6. Chert at Chalcatzingo: Implications of Knapping Strategies and Technological Organization for Formative Economics Grant S. McCall, Rachel A. Horowitz, and Dan M. Healan, 
7. Unraveling Sociopolitical Organization Using Lithic Data: A Case Study from an Agricultural Society in the American Southwest Fumiyasu Arakawa, 
8. Using Portable X-Ray Fluorescence (pXRF) to Source Burlington Chert from the Carson Site, 22CO505, Coahoma County, Mississippi Jayur Madhusudan Mehta, Grant S. McCall, Theodore Marks, and James Enloe, 
9. Stone Age Economics: Efficiency, Blades, Specialization, and Obsolescence John C. Whittaker, 
List of Contributors, 
Index, 

CHAPTER 1

Lithics in Sedentary Societies

Themes, Methods, and Directions

Rachel A. Horowitz and Grant S. McCall

Archaeologists studying sedentary, hierarchical societies have offered vivid accounts of many striking forms of material culture: monuments requiring complex engineering and massive investments of labor; crafts requiring enormous skill and specialized networks of production and distribution; prestige goods marking the wealth, status, and power of elites; and other manifestations of social complexity too numerous to list. Similarly, archaeologists studying stone tools have documented an endlessly diverse range of complex core reduction and tool manufacture practices: thinned bifacial projectile points, the Levallois technique, prismatic blade production, obsidian and chert eccentrics, and countless others. In certain instances, stone tool production in sedentary societies itself took the form of a specialized craft — for example, the production of obsidian blades in Mesoamerica or Neolithic daggers in Scandinavia — and it has thus been studied by the nexus of those concerned with both sedentary societies and stone tools. Unfortunately, however, the vast majority of lithic production in sedentary societies (which tended to be informal and expedient) has received very little attention.

This volume presents case studies of lithics in sedentary societies around the world. The chapters generally reflect the traditional directions of lithic studies in sedentary societies and emphasize the important information lithics can provide about anthropological questions of interest to scholars of sedentary societies. This chapter reviews some of the general trends in global analyses of lithic technology and draws on the chapters in this volume to discuss directions for future research and the relevance of lithic studies to broader anthropological questions. This chapter is organized around four general themes: (1) what lithics can and cannot tell us about sedentary societies, (2) why we should study informal/expedient lithic technologies, (3) how studies of specialized stone tool production fit into the archaeology of both lithics and sedentary societies, and (4) how we build a better approach to the archaeology of stone tools in contexts in which they have generally been ignored up to this point.

Our answers to these questions point to some broader theoretical issues in terms of our reconstruction and modeling of prehistoric economic systems. On the one hand, we find fault with the overwhelming — sometimes seemingly exclusive — focus on production. Our conceptions of production in sedentary societies have articulated well with the latter-day preference for theories based on agency and practice. Yet as this book will show, there are many instances in which unspecialized forms of economic activity profoundly reflect important dynamics of both everyday life and the broader organization of prehistoric economies. Conversely, when stone tools are the result of craft specialization, there are many aspects of their manufacture that may shed light on prehistoric social and economic systems that go beyond a simple sequence of production, the acquisition of a craftsperson's skill, or the elite control of economic commodities. The chapters in this book shed light on these problems and explore some ways forward.

Lithics in Sedentary Societies

One axiom about the archaeology of stone tools is that as the most durable form of artifact in the archaeological record, lithics virtually last forever. As such, they are often the only remaining manifestation of the activities of our hunter-gatherer ancestors. Thankfully, mobile forager societies often did us the favor of producing handsome and complex lithic technologies, and the field of archaeology has done (relatively) well in relating this inherently unfamiliar form of artifactual patterning with the life ways of long-dead hunter-gatherers, especially in terms of subsistence and mobility. Put simply, hunter-gatherer archaeologists have paid so much attention to stone tools because we have not had many other options.

In contrast, more recent sedentary societies have usually left behind a bewildering diversity of durable garbage, and archaeologists of sedentary societies have therefore tended to focus on more familiar or more striking phenomena or both. (Never mind that pile of broken rocks; let's go explore that pyramid.) In addition, relative to other forms of material culture, such as ceramics, lithics aren't even terribly chronologically or culture-historically diagnostic. Thus, for eminently understandable reasons, archaeologists of sedentary societies have tended to prioritize research on monuments, burials, tombs, palaces, jewelry, and ceramics and not studies of lithic technology. Sometimes certain specialized forms of lithic manufacture have been dazzling enough to warrant investigation alongside these other trappings of complexity, though such instances are comparatively rare. Furthermore, the outcomes of such research have tended to be understood with reference to the power of elites, which is, after all, probably reflected better by other forms of material remains, such as those listed above.

Another axiom of lithic analysis is that stone tool technology is reductive; that is, the process of producing and recycling stone tools involves taking large rocks and systematically breaking them to produce smaller rocks. This process of systematically detaching pieces from lithic objects (e.g., reducing cores, thinning bifaces, retouching blanks, and the like) results in an inferable sequence of technical procedures, or a chaîne opératoire, spanning the initial acquisition of lithic raw materials to the ultimate deposition of lithics into the stasis of the archaeological record. In some cases, entire sequences of technical operations took place at a single location, and thus such sites may include evidence concerning the complete life history of the stone tools present at them. In other cases, different stages of the operational sequences involved in stone tool reduction took place at different locations, reflecting mobility or the exchange of lithics as an economic commodity or some combination of the two. Reconstructing the operational sequences involved in stone tool production, as well as the spatial distribution of the various stages of these sequences of reduction, provides an invaluable window on the economic activities and decisions faced by prehistoric peoples involved in the production, exchange, and consumption of lithic technology.

On this point, we come to an important truth about the nature of lithic technology in the lives of past peoples in sedentary or complex societies or both: stone tools were probably not that important relative to other forms of technology and other economic concerns. Disasters happened when crops failed, when water sources dried up, when deadly diseases struck, or when enemy neighbors attacked. In contrast, it was perhaps a modest inconvenience when tool stone became scarce, when working edges became dull, when bifaces broke, or when the blades ran out. Unlike other aspects of economic production, lithic technology was seldom a life-or-death issue for prehistoric peoples (excepting perhaps the rare craft specialists whose livelihoods depended on stone tool production).

This does not mean, however, that archaeological stone tools cannot provide profoundly important information about the lives of prehistoric peoples. Stone tools may not have been as important as all of the other economic commodities exchanged through the trade networks linking polities in various complex societies. Yet by virtue of their durability, their reductive transformation from the quarry to point of consumption and discard, and the spatial variation in the diagnostic waste associated with different stages of reduction, stone tools may be crucial sources of information about the organization of exchange networks over space and time. All the perishable goods that flowed through those exchange networks — goods on which people's lives often literally depended — may be long gone, leaving behind little or no trace. But the archaeological record of the stone tools that flowed through those exchange networks remains, layered with sequential information concerning the activities of the people who produced them, exchanged them, used them, and threw them away.

Likewise, for farmers, assuring the availability of appropriate lithic technology was likely a rather ephemeral issue relative to the planting, tending, harvesting, and processing of food crops — economic activities on which the lives of family members directly depended. Sometimes, of course, stone tools were specialized components of composite tools that were fairly important in agricultural activities, such as sickle blades or the tribula of threshing sledges. Such forms of agricultural lithic technology have indeed received significant attention from archaeologists (e.g., Anderson et al. 2004; Kardulias 2008; Whittaker 1996, 2003, 2014a, 2014b, 2014c; Whittaker et al. 2009, this volume; Yerkes 2000), and rightly so. More often than not, however, stone tools were used to manufacture and maintain the components of other tools and weapons (McCall 2012). And since there is almost always some usable stone around somewhere, assuring the presence of appropriate lithic technology usually boiled down to a set of tactics for minimizing inconvenience in finding stone and reducing cores.

Yet while the vital economic activities of farmers usually left little or no trace in the archaeological record, the stone tools associated with these agricultural economic tasks are permanently present, often in cyclopean quantities. Once again, we can make inferences about the sequences of technical activities involved in the manufacture and use of stone tools in such contexts. These operational sequences were articulated with the broader organization of economic activities in which agricultural peoples were involved, and the structure of economic activities within agricultural systems conditioned the activities involved in the production of stone tools. We can learn indispensable things about the organization of agricultural economies by investigating how, when, and where people (1) acquired tool stone, (2) reduced cores and produced tools, (3) used tools in different ways over the course of their use-lives, and (4) discarded spent tools in the context of other refuse. Therefore, while the expedient flaking of some chert core in the residential compound of some ancient Mesoamerican farmstead may not be very interesting in its own right (see McCall et al., this volume), the articulation of knapping activities over space and time with the life-and-death economic activities of those farmers can provide uniquely important information about the life ways of long-dead peoples. Lithic technology, in a sense, mapped onto the economic activities of agricultural peoples that we would like to know more about.

Finally, there is a third axiom about lithic technology: it is globally and temporally ubiquitous in prehistory. Prior to the spread of metallurgy, stone tools had been produced by virtually every prehistoric society on every inhabited continent, from Plio-Pleistocene australopiths in the Rift Valley of sub-Saharan Africa to the sixteenth-century Aztecs of central Mexico. In fact, many resourceful peoples in complex societies continued to produce stone tools long after the advent of metal counterparts (see Davis, Manclossi and Rosen, and Whittaker, this volume), in part because of the widespread (although uneven) distribution of suitable lithic raw material sources. And a reasonable number of modern peoples continue to produce stone tools today (see McCall 2012 for discussion).

One implication of all this is that the archaeological record of stone tools is immense, diverse, and associated with nearly all past peoples. The other implication is that we can surely profit from studying variability in lithic technology over the vast diversity of contexts in which it may be found. We have accomplished this, at least to some extent, in our examinations of prehistoric hunter-gatherer technological systems, where we have demonstrated that stone tool technologies tend to vary in relation to mobility, settlement systems, and subsistence strategies. Yet our understanding of the lithic technologies of sedentary societies remains relatively poor, and in these cases the conventional hunter-gatherer organizational currencies of mobility/settlement and subsistence do not make sense. Obviously, a better empirical understanding of these cases is needed, as is a better theoretical toolkit for making sense of lithic variability as we continue to document it.

Chapters in this book build on a certain set of theoretical innovations in the study of the lithic technological systems present among sedentary agricultural societies. Specifically, the chapters examine the ways lithics may provide information about economic activity, political organization, resource and production management, and the relationship between societal and technological change. Lithics are perhaps most commonly studied in sedentary societies as a way of understanding the segmentation and organization of past economic systems (Druart 2010; McDonald 1991; Parry and Kelly 1987; Rosen 2010; Sorensen 2010; Teltser 1991; Torrence 1984, 1986; Horowitz, McCall et al., and Paling, this volume). Lithic distribution patterns have sometimes been used as indicators of various types of economic activities, vectors of resource distribution, and the relevant involvement of different individuals in economic activity (i.e., market exchange; Garraty 2009; Hirth 1998, 2010; Minc 2006, 2009; Santone 1993; Speal 2009; Stark and Garraty 2010).

These sorts of theoretical approaches to the study of lithic technology have been particularly prevalent in the archaeology of Mesoamerica, as exemplified by the three Mesoamerican chapters in the volume (Horowitz, McCall et al., and Paling). All three chapters focus on the importance of formal and informal tools in various aspects of Mesoamerican economies, pointing out in all cases that household residents participated in many aspects of lithic production, particularly of informal tools. These chapters illustrate the variability of lithic production across Mesoamerica, in particular the presence of both formal and informal tool technologies, a phenomenon discussed further below and by Manclossi and Rosen, and McCall et al. (this volume).

Our understanding of prehistoric economic strategies, variability among economic activities, and the actors involved in lithic economies affects our understandings of economic variables as sources of power for individuals of varying socioeconomic and political statuses, hence facilitating information on political organization and sources of power (see Schroeder 2005). In this volume, Arakawa provides an example of such studies from the southwestern United States. He uses lithics as a marker of sociopolitical organization, particularly for examining territoriality and the movement of populations. Similarly, Mehta and colleagues (this volume) address the role of political influence from other areas on the obtention of chert materials in the Lower Mississippi Valley, particularly the Carson site. The use of lithics to address economic and sociopolitical organization enhances our abilities to examine these systems in the past, particularly highlighting the ways different materials may illustrate variability in such systems, or throughout their use-life (see Appadurai 1986).

Another direction in the study of stone tool technology is the organization of resource procurement, particularly in terms of the management of lithic raw material sources. Within sedentary societies, extensive variability exists in the ways raw material sources were managed. In many Egyptian, Greco-Roman, and Inka contexts, quarry areas for building materials and tool construction, and the resultant products, were under some degree of imperial control (Cantarutti 2013; Degryse et al. 2009; Harrell and Storemyr 2009; Jennings et al. 2013; Kelany et al. 2009; Lollet et al. 2008; McCallum 2009; Ogburn 2011, 2013; Peacock and Maxfield 2007; Teather 2011; Torrence 1984; Tripcevich and Contreras 2011, 2013; Weisberber 1983). Evidence for such control takes the form of (1) organized work areas, including storage facilities (Cantarutti 2013; Harrell and Storemyr 2009; Storemyr et al. 2010); (2) transportation routes (Harrell and Storemyr 2009; Heldal 2009; Kelany et al. 2009; Ogburn 2013; Storemyr et al. 2010); (3) the scale and organization of production (Heldal 2009; Salazar et al. 2013); (4) widespread distribution of finished products (McCallum 2009); (5) organized villages for workers (Harrell and Storemyr 2009; Peacock and Maxfield 2007); and (6) state-sponsored ritual in and around work areas (Vaughn et al. 2013). Less evidence, however, exists in other areas of the world for such strict top-down management (i.e., Cobb 1988, 2000; Horowitz 2015, 2017, 2018; King 2000; Horowitz, this volume). This is an indication that there is variability in the management of lithic resources in sedentary societies and that this variability may shed light on the nature of prehistoric social, economic, and political systems.

(Continues...)

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Edition details

• Publisher: University Press of Colorado
• Publication date: 2019
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1607328909
• ISBN 13: 9781607328902
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 270
• Editor: Horowitz Rachel A., McCall Grant S.