The revolution that wasn't: a new interpretation of the origin of modern human behavior.

Andrefsky, Jr., William. 1994 Raw Material Availability and the Organization of Technology. American Antiquity 59:21‑35.

Raw-Material Availability and the Organization of Technology

There is hardly a more romantic image in anthropology than that of a small band of hunter-gatherers setting off into the bush, their few belongings on their backs. Mobility, in fact, has long been considered a defining characteristic of hunter-gatherers. At the Man the Hunter conference, for example, Lee & DeVore (101:1 1) assumed that all hunter-gatherers "move around a lot." This is not entirely accurate, for many hunter-gatherers move infrequently-some less than many "sedentary" horticultural societies. Early concepts of mobility blinded us to the fact that mobility is universal, variable, and multi-dimensional. Partly because of these concepts, and partly because we do not understand the relationships between movement and material culture, archaeologists have had difficulty identifying different forms and levels of mobility. This is especially true in defining and then detecting sedentism. It is important that we learn to recognize the various forms of mobility archaeologically, because the ways people move exert strong influences on their culture and society. In his classic study, Mauss (105), for example, related the Inuit's seasonal mobility to their moral and religious life. Sahlins (136) saw mobility as conditioning cultural attitudes towards material goods. Currently, archaeologists focus attention on the sedentarization process because reduced mobility precipitates dramatic changes in food storage, trade, territoriality, social and gender inequality, male/female work patterns, subsis-

https://www.jstor.org/stable/info/2155980

Mobility/Sedentism: Concepts, Archaeological Measures, and Effects

The hypothesis that the principal varieties of Middle Paleolithic scrapers reflect varying degrees of resharpening and rejuvenation, rather than discrete emic types, has generated considerably controversy over the past decade. While there have been certain misunderstandings surrounding the proposed models of scraper reduction, this controversy also reflects different approaches taken by prehistorians in interpreting lithic artifacts. Placing the notion of scraper reduction in the context of lithic processes generally known as the Frison Effect, this article presents the background and intellectual context of this interpretation and attempts to clarify the models themselves and their test implications. It also reviews and summarizes data generated by several independent tests of the hypothesis and presents new data bearing on this question.

Middle paleolithic scraper reduction: Background, clarification, and review of the evidence to date

Researchers who analyze stone tools and their production debris have made significant progress in understanding the relationship between stone tools and human organizational strategies. Stone tools are understood to be morphologically dynamic throughout their use-lives; the ever-changing morphology of stone tools is intimately associated with the needs of tool users. It also has become apparent to researchers that interpretations of lithic analysis are more productive when the unique contexts and situations for which lithic artifacts were made, used, modified, and ultimately discarded are considered. This article reviews the recent literature on stone tool production with an emphasis on raw material procurement, manufacturing techniques, and tool maintenance processes as they relate to adaptive strategies of toolmakers and users.

The Analysis of Stone Tool Procurement, Production, and Maintenance

1. A brief introduction to lithic analysis 2. Basics of stone tool production 3. Lithic raw materials 4. Getting started in lithic analysis: identification and classification 5. Flake debitage attributes 6. Approaches to debitage analysis 7. Approaches to stone tool analysis 8. Artifact diversity and site function 9. Lithic analysis and prehistoric sedentism 10. Concluding remarks.

Lithics : macroscopic approaches to analysis

This study shows how the occurrence of lithic raw-materials articulate with hunter gatherer technological organization. Three archaeological data sets representing 109 different sites and one ethnographic data set from Australia are examined to show that lithic raw-material size, shape, quality, and availability play a major role in hunter gatherer decisions to make various kinds of stone tools. These characteristics of lithic material occurrence are used to help explain why expedient technologies such as bipolar tool production are sometimes used, and why formalized technologies such as bifacial production may be selected as a tool production strategy. Stone tool morphological variability and technological variability are shown to be directly related to the geological occurrence of stone tool raw materials. © 1994 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

William Andrefsky

Papers

Raw-Material Availability and the Organization of Technology

Lithics : macroscopic approaches to analysis

The Analysis of Stone Tool Procurement, Production, and Maintenance

The geological occurrence of lithic material and stone tool production strategies

Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis