Technological Choices

Transformation in Material Cultures Since the Neolithic

Pierre Lemonnier

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134523061
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Technological Choices applies the critical tools of archaeology to the subject of technology and its impact on humankind throughout the ages. An examination of the challenges technological innovations present to various cultures, Technological Choices asserts that in any society, such choices are made on the basis of cultural values and social relations, rather than on the inherent benefits in technology itself. Of course, this revolutionary viewpoint has critical implications for contemporary Western societies. Based on case studies covering a wide range of chronologies and geographies, Technological Choices moves rapidly from Neolithic Europe to the modern industrial age, stopping on the way to examine the tribes of Papua, New Guinea, rural Indian and North African societies as well as several European peasant communities. The techniques studied range from the manufacture of stone implements to the development of high-tech transportation devices. With its breadth of subject matter and multidisciplinary approach, Technological Choices offers new insight into the interrelationship between technology and society. Also unprecedented is the book's emphasis on the functional aspects of material culture.

1

NORTH WIND, SOUTH WIND

Neolithic technical choices in the Jura Mountains, 3700–2400 BC

Pierre Pétrequin

For lack of living witnesses, the prehistorian has relied principally upon the study of ceramic ware and its decorations to establish the spatial and/or chronological boundaries of the first material cultures of Western European agriculturalists. In this archaeological view of civilization, pottery, like linguistic sequences and phyla in today’s societies, is seen as a vocabulary of communication, even though we are all aware that linguistic evidence and the contents of material culture can rarely, if ever, be superimposed. The archaeologist therefore sees pottery shapes and decorations as secondary characteristics that are significant, but devoid of material efficacy (derniers degrés du fait (last levels of the fact), Leroi-Gourhan 1943).¹ Having defined the symbolic entities – the distributions of spatially and temporally related pottery types – the prehistorian has sought to correlate these with other classes of artefacts, whose meaning, in terms of function or technical system, may be conjectured (e.g. the stone axe, arrows) or which remains to be discovered (e.g. most flint or bone tools). Under the name of culture or civilization, then, various assemblages have been identified, which include technical features (the tools themselves) and sometimes technical processes (the ways tools are used to act on matter), but always privileging the symbolic information provided by the pottery and the decorations (secondary features). In this case, for a given feature, the prehistorian will speak of a good cultural or chronological marker which, in his opinion, enables him to recognize a civilization or a chronological period; likewise, he will speak of a mediocre marker when the feature is more ubiquitous, used with no noticeable variation by a group of different “communities”² throughout space and time. By ranking the sequences pottery/decorations/ornaments/tools/technical processes, by order of cultural effectiveness,³ the accent automatically falls on the sphere of signifiers, in symbolic terms, thereby positing the underlying hypothesis that the various prehistoric civilizations expressed their affinities or oppositions by adopting, above all, similar or different secondary characteristics, according to what archaeologists see as a universal need to differentiate themselves from their neighbors. Experience has shown these assemblages of material culture often to be fairly unstable; this has been accounted for by opposing block or monothetic civilizations (Clarke 1968, 1972), whose components covary in the same direction, to polythetic civilizations with key types (artefacts specific to a defined chronological and geographic whole); exclusive types (proof of the originality of certain components within a civilization) and non-essential types, which point to phenomena of continuity and communication with other regions and cultures. It becomes evident, then, that to solve the problem of how to classify artefacts, the prehistorian has invented his own simplified version of ethnological methods (Coudart and Lemonnier 1984), but to compensate for this methodological approximation, he has recently adopted the art of measurement, thereby endowing himself with a remarkable descriptive and statistical arsenal which enables him at present to work on thousands of artefacts and to clearly visualize the mutual relations they entertain over time and space (Voruz 1984).

Making our way down the chronological ladder, we meet up with the ethnology of techniques, now enjoying a remarkable development, initiated in particular by Leroi-Gourhan (1943, 1945), who stands at one of the points at which ethnology and prehistory converge. What is most often lacking here is historical depth,⁴ but the theoretical constructions are based on present-day, verifiable examples, in which technical features and processes can be remarkably well situated in the context of living societies. It is indispensable that any theory accounts for both the formidable complexity of human relationships and the most ordinary of human technical processes (Lemonnier 1986); this complexity absorbs so much of the energy that goes into research that it often precludes precisely calculating the distribution of the technical features under study; contrary to the present trend in prehistory, which tends to use factorial analysis to detail the interrelations among artefacts, the ethnology of techniques must deal with such diverse and complex data that it accounts for assemblages in terms of presence/absence,⁵ just when prehistorians are in the process of abandoning the approach.

In his work on material culture and the anthropology of technical systems, P. Lemonnier (1986) has shown that technical features and all or part of certain technical processes, while having a perfectly effective action on matter (“first levels of the fact”) also function as systems of meaning. Among the Anga groups of New Guinea, he has found proof of arbitrary choices, from one group to another, among theoretically juxtaposable techniques; these choices may be used by the respective groups to reinforce ethnic identity marking through material culture. But are these significant technical choices used for cultural differentiation alone? And of all the techniques known, why these in particular and not others? We do not have a theory of material culture as a set of significant features.⁶ Besides indisputable instances of technical choice, which have other meanings than simply to announce one’s uniqueness to others, we need to be able to determine the conditions that decide when a feature of a technical system becomes the object of choice or, on the contrary, remains invariable in the different cultural groups. It would even be desirable to know where to draw the line between technical features whose main function is to signify and those involved primarily in an action on matter (Lemonnier 1986: 178).

Because this is where the concerns of prehistorians and ethnologists meet, we will seek to illustrate this attempt at ethnology of techniques with some examples from prehistory.

CHOOSING A REGION AND A PERIOD

When launching out on a study of prehistoric tools using an ethnological as well as a traditional archaeological approach, a number of conditions must obtain if a series of potential errors is to be eliminated: in the event, the chronological approximations and short industrial series found in various contexts.

As far as the prehistory of Western Europe is concerned, one large region (the lacustrine zones northwest of the Alps and one chronological period (the Middle Neolithic II and the Late Neolithic, from 3700 to 2400 BC) are far and away preferable to any other sector for this type of fine-grained approach. This set of archaeological sites is comprised in the main of permanent villages established on lakes in the Alpine foreland (figure 1.1). In the ruins of these wetland settlements, tens of thousands of artefacts have been preserved in an anaerobic atmosphere: vegetable products (seeds, textiles, wooden tools, etc.) are as well conserved as normally non-perishable materials (stone, pottery). In addition, the posts and oak planks can be subjected to dendrochronological analysis and, by comparing the results with a standard growth curve for oak trees in the Danube valley, it is often possible to date the felling to the nearest year (Billamboz et al. 1988; Gross et al. 1987; A. M. and P. Pétrequin 1988; P. Pétrequin et al. 1987/1988; Schifferdecker 1988; Suter 1987; Wolf 1988). This in turn implies that in these lacustrine basins, and there only, we can follow in detail the evolution of the tools left in the villages over a span of more than a thousand years (figure 1.2). Moreover, the short distance separating these lakes makes it possible, using a relatively fine screen (60–100 km at the most), to follow the spatial variability of the different artefactual assemblages over a single chronological period in which error of attribution can scarcely exceed 25–50 years.⁷

As far as cultural assemblages are concerned, the lake area covering southern Germany, Switzerland and eastern France (figure 1.1) is particularly interesting, for there Central European Neolithic influences (the northern zone) and Mediterranean Neolithic influences (the southern zone) collide, compete and supplant each other time and again. Depending on the Neolithic period, western Switzerland (figure 1.2) hosts civilizations of distant southern obedience (Egolzwil, Cortaillod), regional evolutions developing in a relatively closed circuit (Port-Conty, Cortaillod, Lüscherz) or cultural stimuli clearly from the northeast (Horgen, Auvernier, Corded Ware). In this context of outside influences that work upon each other over space and time, to the theme of “north wind, south wind,” it is not our intention to present an overview of what we know about the zone. We will choose only those themes and examples likely to throw some light on the problematic of technical choices; we will then compare certain features and processes found in two neighboring, yet culturally different, regions using the archaeological data we have (figure 1.1, Clairvaux and Neuchâtel); or the distribution of tools particularly important for forest agriculturalists (axe, adze) in broader areas from Lake Zürich to Lake Clairvaux.

Figure 1.1 Lacustrine zone northwest of the Alps. Principal geographical entities mentioned and cultural frontier between the Jura plateaux to the west and the western Swiss lakes to the east.

Figure 1.2 Chronological relations between the material cultures mentioned on both sides of the Jura boundary, represented by a bold vertical rule. The chronological periods dated in solar years by dendrochronology appear in gray.

UNIVERSALLY KNOWN TOOLS?

By around 3800 BC, the farming population northwest of the Alps had already increased since its beginnings towards 5500 BC. The ancient Neolithic settlement pattern along with its traditions (fairly sedentarized valley agriculture, highly developed animal husbandry, infrequent use of the forest and interfluve and dwelling in collective long houses) had completely vanished. Towards 4500 BC, new socio-economic models appeared, characterized by more systematic colonization of the plateaux and wooded zones; hunting often developed to the detriment of stock-raising, and the villages, comprised of small architectural cells, were engaged in circuits of itinerant agriculture in rapid-growth forests; in the most fertile agricultural zones, serious indications (sometimes monumental graves, burials containing rich furnishings) suggest a thoroughgoing transformation of society, in which a hierarchy emerges to the benefit of a few families, while, in the densely populated zones, the settlement pattern and management of space are organized around enclosed settlements and sometimes monumental enclosures (Dubouloz 1989). Somewhere between 3800 and 3700 BC (figure 1.3), this mode of organization was clearly visible in the Jura mountains, with hamlets and fortified walls in the valleys and on the western rim of plateaux, non-hierarchically organized hamlets on the plateaux themselves and the recently colonized lakes, and finally hunting camps at higher altitudes (A. M. and P. Pétrequin 1988; P. Pétrequin 1989). The cultural boundary between the Burgundy Middle Neolithic (on the western slope of the Juras) and Cortaillod (at the foot of the eastern slope) runs roughly through the high hunting grounds. Beginning around 3600 BC, we see the gradual failure of the socio-economic model of the Middle Neolithic II and the abandonment of central places and protective enclosures. Basic social units tended to break away once more and regroup into hamlets with a weak hierarchical structure, still engaged in itinerant agriculture. Male s...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Contents
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• List of figures
• List of plates
• List of tables
• Introduction
• 1 NORTH WIND, SOUTH WIND
• 2 THE WATCH AND THE WATERCLOCK
• 3 THE REINDEERMAN’S LASSO
• 4 PIGS AS ORDINARY WEALTH
• 5 POTTERY TECHNIQUES IN INDIA
• 6 OF MILLS AND WATERWHEELS
• 7 TECHNICAL INNOVATION AND CULTURAL RESISTANCE
• 8 THE HUNTER AND HIS GUN IN HAUTE-PROVENCE
• 9 GIVING THE POTTER A CHOICE
• 10 A GAZOGENE IN COSTA RICA
• 11 THE FACTORY AS ARTEFACT
• 12 ETHNOGRAPHY OF A “HIGH-TECH” CASE
• 13 DOMINANT REPRESENTATIONS AND TECHNICAL CHOICES
• Index