Aggregates, Formational Emergence, and the Focus on Practice in Stone Artifact Archaeology
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Aggregates, Formational Emergence, and the Focus on Practice in Stone Artifact Archaeology Zeljko Rezek 1,2 & Simon J. Holdaway 3 & Deborah I. Olszewski 4 & Sam C. Lin 5,6 & Matthew Douglass 7 & Shannon McPherron 1 & Radu Iovita 8,9 & David R. Braun 1,10,11 & Dennis Sandgathe 12 # The Author(s) 2020
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. Keywords Stone artifacts . Archaeological record . Aggregates . Formational emergence .
Stone-use practice . Adaptation . Behavioral evolution
Introduction Inferring behavior with potentially adaptive significance from the stone artifact record has been a major challenge in our field from its inception. This challenge remains
* Zeljko Rezek [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Rezek et al.
despite the current resurgence of raw material and use-wear studies, holistic assemblage-scale analyses, and advanced experimental and quantitative approaches. One of the major reasons behind this challenge is the persistent focus on artifact manufacture and form—both the technological and morphological appearance of stone artifacts (Dibble et al. 2017; Holdaway and Douglass 2012). While more than a century of research has moved us a long way towards understanding how artifacts were manufactured and what was their immediate utilization, these are just two aspects in the complexity of use of stone, and as such are only part of the broader array of potential data sources for developing inferences about past hominin lifeways. By stone use, we mean any kind of action involving stone in its either natural or humanly modified form: knapping, transporting, selecting, (re)using, recycling, etc.,
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