Aggregates, Formational Emergence, and the Focus on Practice in Stone Artifact Archaeology

Abstract

The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. This analytical focus on technological and morphological appearance is one of the characteristics of the conventional approach for constructing inferences from this record. An equally persistent routine involves ascribing the emerged patterns and variability within the archaeological deposits directly to long-term central tendencies in human actions and cultural transmission. Here we re-evaluate this conventional approach. By invoking some of the known concerns and concepts about the formation of archaeological record, we introduce notions of aggregates and formational emergence to expand on the understanding of how artifacts accumulate, what these accumulations represent, and how the patterns and variability among them emerge. To infer behavior that could inform on past lifeways, we further promote a shift in the focus of analysis from the technological and morphological appearance of artifacts and assemblages to the practice of stone use. We argue for a more rigorous and multi-level inferential procedure in modeling behavioral adaptation and evolution.

The Effects of Secondary Recycling on the Technological Character of Lithic Assemblages

“…Assemblages are not necessarily created as entire units at one instance in time and then deposited as a single event (Binford 1981;Dibble et al 2017;Kuhn and Zwyns 2018;Miller-Atkins and Premo 2018;Perreault 2018;Rezek et al 2020). This means that a single assemblage can contain artifacts that were never used contemporaneously and that were deposited by different groups of people (Dibble et al 2017;Kuhn and Zwyns 2018;Rezek et al 2020). The secondary recycling of previously deposited artifacts adds an additional aspect by allowing different groups of people to modify previously discarded materials.…”

Thinking Outside the Box at Open-Air Archeological Contexts: Examples From Loess Landscapes in Southeast Romania

“…Here we argue for more careful consideration of the latter. Understanding Paleolithic mobility at landscape scales requires both nodes of dense interaction (sites) and networks of taskscape traces (Rezek et al, 2020).…”

Operationalizing niche construction theory with stone tools

“…The most direct indicator is through raw material sourcing and artifact refitting 54 . Yet, while these difficult and labor-intensive approaches can unequivocally demonstrate the translocation of objects from Point A to Point B 55 , it remains challenging to evaluate the nature of human movement behind the transport events 56 . Alternatively, an analytical methodology known as the cortex ratio 57,58 provides an objective measure for detecting and comparing past movement.…”

“…First, the scale of inference is often mismatched to the scale of observation 76 because the relationship between individual decision-making and the operational sequences involved in stone tool production are not the only forces that shape the lithic record 51,54 . Instead, what we measure are the properties emerging from recursive actions involving selection, movement, modification, use, discard, as well as contextual processes like sedimentation, and erosion 56 . Second, focusing on techno-morphology privileges information coming from sites and regions where these attributes are visible, numerous, and variable enough for analysis.…”

“…Moreover, assemblages, sites, and settlement patterns are themselves constituted by the interaction between landscapes and people, including the archaeologists who define them 56 . Some of the geomorphic effects on the visibility of the archaeological record, such as the dependence of perceived cultural rates of change on the age of the deposit and its degree of time-averaging 85,106 can be generalized more than others that are region-and topography-specific.…”