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...