Book review: The prehistoric apprentice: Investigating apprenticeship, know-how and expertise in prehistoric technologies; L’apprenti préhistorique: Appréhender l’apprentissage, les savoir-faire et l’expertise à travers les productions techniques des soci

Abstract


 Describing cultural change and variability and inferring sociocultural dynamics about past people and communities may be among archaeology’s main goals as a field of practice. In this regard, the concept of skill has proved its usefulness to, time and again, expand the breath of archaeologists and lithic technologists’ analyses. It covers a wide range of applications, from apprenticeship, cognition, paleo-sociology, spatial organization. It is one of the main causes for material culture variability, up there with raw material constraints, design, technological organization or cultural norms. Yet, while skill has certainly been the focus of some research in the last decades, it remains quite peripheral, when considering how central the concept should be to technological inquiries. Whatever the reasons may be, this book, edited by Laurent Klaric and fully bilingual (French and English), aims at changing that, and argues for skill to become a central concern in lithic technology. Its chapters do so strongly and the end-result is a book that should become a reference for lithic technologists, whatever their research interests or schools of thought may be.

Inferring cultural reproduction from lithic data: A critical review

“…Beyond the CET‐informed studies on stone artifacts, there is a long‐established research tradition in lithic analysis revolving around the apprenticeship and the evaluation of technical expertise of the knapper 11,32,99,100 . pp.78‐103 Despite the fact that it is not directly rooted in formal cultural evolutionary models, it has the potential to be incorporated into the EES framework 11 ,pp.164‐171 since studies within this pluralistic tradition often emphasize idiosyncratic and contextualized causes and interactions within a technological system.…”