Psychological components of middle paleolithic technology: The proceduralization of lithic core reduction

The Proceduralization of Hominin Knapping Skill: Memorizing Different Lithic Technologies

“…However, these rotations were faster and more predictable. Like Sumner (2011), we thus found Middle Palaeolithic Levallois knapping to bear much proceduralization potential. The rapid and predictable sequence of core rotations in Levallois knapping speaks to the complex hierarchical structure of its reduction sequence (Muller et al 2017), which appears to necessitate little deliberation over rotations and leaves little room for random platform selections.…”

“…Despite this recent attention on systems of cognition and memory, seldom has the role of procedural memory been explicitly considered in stone toolmaking (but see Bleed et al 2017; Herzlinger et al 2017b; Sumner 2011). However, it has been flagged by Wynn and Coolidge (Wynn 2008; Wynn et al 2009; Wynn & Coolidge 2019) as one of the types of cognition probably most significant to lithic technology, and related concepts like chunk-based learning and cognitive versus perceptual motor skills have been quantified in recent experiments (Pargeter et al 2019; Stout et al 2015; 2021).…”

“…The only attempt thus far at explicitly quantifying proceduralization archaeologically was conducted by Sumner (2011), who reconstructed the minutiae of the reduction sequence of Levallois cores from Taramsa-1 to investigate the involvement of procedural memory in the Middle Palaeolithic. More recently, a series of experiments have charted the power-learning curves of Palaeolithic knapping, finding the similar concept of chunking, wherein several tasks can be encoded into easier-to-memorize ‘chunks’, to be fundamental to skill acquisition (Pargeter et al 2019; Stout et al 2015; 2021).…”

“…In theory, the proceduralization of knapping routines should occur during the learning process, as a greater proportion of the reduction sequence becomes embedded in the procedural memory system and the knapper comes to rely less on their declarative memories. Procedural memory can be thought of as a series of automatically accessed rules pertaining to conditions and actions (Sumner 2011). The conditions define the circumstances to which a rule should be applied, and that rule is carried out by the corresponding action.…”