Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology
- PDF / 3,308,229 Bytes
- 54 Pages / 439.37 x 666.142 pts Page_size
- 43 Downloads / 209 Views
Materiality, Agency and Evolution of Lithic Technology: an Integrated Perspective for Palaeolithic Archaeology Shumon T. Hussain 1,2,3,4,5
& Manuel
Will 6
# The Author(s) 2020
Abstract Considerations of materiality and object-oriented approaches have greatly influenced the development of archaeological theory in recent years. Yet, Palaeolithic archaeology has been slow in incorporating this emerging body of scholarship and exploring its bearing on the human deep past. This paper probes into the potential of materiality theory to clarify the material dynamics of the Plio-Pleistocene and seeks to re-articulate the debate on the evolution of our species with materiality discourses in archaeology and the humanities more broadly. We argue that the signature temporalities and geospatial scales of observation provided by the Palaeolithic record offer unique opportunities to examine the active role of material things, objects, artefacts and technologies in the emergence, stabilisation and transformation of hominin lifeworlds and the accretion of long-term trajectories of material culture change. We map three axes of human–thing relations—ecological, technical and evolutionary—and deploy a range of case studies from the literature to show that a critical re-assessment of material agency not only discloses novel insights and questions, but can also refine what we already know about the human deep past. Our exploration underscores the benefits of de-centring human behaviour and intentionality and demonstrates that materiality lends itself as a productive nexus of exchange and mutual inspiration for diverging schools and research interests in Palaeolithic archaeology. An integrated object-oriented perspective calls attention to the human condition as a product of millennial-scale human– thing co-adaptation, in the course of which hominins, artefacts and technologies continuously influenced and co-created each other. Keywords Human evolution . Stone artefacts . Non-human turn . Material agency . Object-
scapes . Transdisciplinarity . Deep past
* Shumon T. Hussain [email protected] Extended author information available on the last page of the article
Hussain and Will
Introduction Palaeolithic archaeology is conventionally defined as the study of the behaviour and lifeways of hominins during the earliest periods of prehistory, addressing the enormous range of preliterary and presedentary human experience from the emergence of the first stone tools between 3 and 4 million years ago to the end of the last Ice Age about 11,800 years ago. As perhaps no other field of prehistoric investigation, Palaeolithic research relies strongly, and often exclusively, on the patchy record of stones surviving the thousands or even millions of years of combined human and geological history. Despite the apparent over-abundance of material evidence—artefacts and ecofacts— relative to hominin fossils and biosignatures, Palaeolithic archaeologists commonly conceive of their research enterprise as the examination of hominin behaviour or the
Data Loading...
