Antler as raw material in the Starčevo culture

2014

Archaeotechnology, studying technology from prehistory to the Middle Ages, 2014

Analyses of everyday objects (from pottery, flint, stone, osseous materials) form the basis of all archaeological research, regardless of the period, region, methodological approach or theoretical framework. Although methodology went through significant changes in past decades, especially regarding the importance of experimental and ethnoarchaeological methods, many of these analyses still relied on typology, and the theoretical discussions were less diverse and much slower. In recent years, a concept of technology as a cultural-driven phenomenon has become more widely accepted, largely influenced by the technological approach from the French anthropological and archaeological school. The conceptual paradigm of chaine operatoire is today a commonplace in almost every analysis of artefact manufacture, and it also triggered the creation of numerous different models for analyses from raw material managing through to the use and discard of artefacts. This paper discusses past and current approaches towards technology and its role within the given society. The combination of technological and contextual approach may not only improve our understanding of the artefacts in the context of a given society, their value, importance, function, and meaning, but also can help in starting the discussion on the creation of new theoretical frameworks for social phenomena such as raw material procurement, the organisation of craft production, the labour division, etc. The case studies on the bone industry in the Neolithic Balkans will be used as examples of the possibilities of such approach.

Track Changes, 2011

In contrast to the essentially processualist understanding of technology that had long dominated material culture studies, in recent years anthropological thought has begun to treat artifice as an inalienably social aspect of human cultural systems. No longer seen merely as evolutionary responses to environmental factors, the physical tools a culture produces are gaining recognition, in both their forms and their uses, as loci for the enactment of social forces. An analysis of metalworking practices, based on both ethnographic and archaeological evidence, may serve to illustrate the degree to which technologies are socially predicated at all stages of the production process. Metal is a particularly apt medium for study in this regard, for at least two reasons: first, it has been worked and wielded by human hands for over seven thousand years, providing a huge corpus of material for comparison. Second, and perhaps most relevant to the present question, metals, by virtue of their combination of plasticity and strength, lend themselves to an unmatched array of forms and applications, and are thus capable of expressing the widest possible range of human intentions.

Journal of Anthropological Archaeology, 1986

Oxford Handbook of Material Culture Studies, 2010

Humans live in a world of things. They are surrounded by artefacts. Referred to as the social shaping of technology, this has been an interesting area of research in the recent past. The focus of this article is on the ‘material life’ of human beings, and the place of technology within it. The authors approach this topic from the discipline of archaeology, specifically behavioural archaeology, but also draw on research in other fields. This article, expands this framework to include the life histories of technologies and associated material practices. This article further contextualizes contemporary technology studies, primarily in archaeology, and considers how theoretical concepts from behavioural archaeology and social constructivist studies of technology might be combined. Archaeological studies of technology are explained in details in the following section with special emphasis on performance characteristics. This article also explains the life history of technology which helps us conceptualize material practices in relation to objects and technologies.

Modes of Production and Archaeology , 2017

Modes of Production and Archaeology, 2017

Many readers (and especially those English-speakers under ~50 years of age) primarily employ secondhand knowledge of the writing of Marx and Engels. Basic Marxist concepts that structure analysis (such as mode of production) have been filtered through the writings of anthropologists and understood under different names and are now attributed to scholars of the second half of the twentieth century. We therefore begin by reviewing key concepts from Marx and Engels’ original writings and define basic Marxist terms.