The major objective of this unit is to be sure that you can answer the question: “What is a stone tool?” In these introductory notes we will show how the study materials of the unit are structured to enable you to do this. We expect you to be able to refer back to this introduction later in the unit. For this reason we have put in links to materials that are not available straight away. The first release of materials will only involve 2 Practicals and 8 Readings.
It is a good idea, at this stage to consider “What is a ‘tool’?” You will find various definitions in various places. we looked at the Macquarie Dictionary:
tool n. 1. an instrument, esp. one held in the hand, for performing or facilitating mechanical operations…
When you find a definition, consider whether it allows you to answer the question of whether birds’ nests and beaver dams are tools. We hope you enjoy this Gary Larson cartoon.
Then we should turn to the question of stone tools in the archaeological record of the history of humans and our ancestors. Begin by looking at your 1st year textbooks.
In the textbook for ARPA 104 Renfrew and Bahn Archaeology (2000, 3rd edition, p. 319-320) you will read (all emphasis is added for you to notice):
“The history of stone tool technology shows a sporadically increasing degree of refinement. The first recognizable tools are simple choppers and flakes made by knocking pieces off pebbles to obtain sharp edges. The best-known examples are the so-called Oldowan tools from Olduvai Gorge, Tanzania. After hundreds of thousands of years, people progressed to flaking both surfaces of the tool, eventually producing the symmetrical Acheulian hand-axe shape, with its finely worked sharp edges. The next improvement, dating to around 100,000 years ago, came with the introduction of the “Levallois technique”—named after a site in a Paris suburb where it was first identified—where the core was knapped in such a way that large flakes of pre-determined size and shape could be removed.
“Around 35, 000 years ago, with the Upper Palaeolithic period, blade technology became dominant in some parts of the world. Long, parallel-sided blades were systematically removed with a punch and hammerstone from a cylindrical core. This was a great advance, not only because it produced large numbers of blanks that could be further trimmed and retouched into a wide range of specialised tools (scrapers, burins, borers), but also because it was far less wasteful of the raw material, obtaining much greater total length of working edges than ever before from a given amount of stone.”
You can see some pictures of casts of such objects at
http://lithiccastinglab.com/gallery-pages/oldowanstonetools.htm
Many textbooks illustrate stone artefacts using line drawings which have a number of conventions. Practical 1 requires you to draw the two artefacts we have sent you, so that you understand some of these conventions and can understand the readings better.
You will be asked to read a paper, in Readings 3 and 15, which questions some of the ways in which this story is expressed (particularly those that imply notions of progress or advance), but a sequence of the sort indicated underlies many accounts of the earliest tool making by human ancestors.
Students of ARPA 102 will find Jurmain, Nelson, Kilgore and Trevathan in Essential of physical anthropology (2001, 4th edition, pp171-172) say:
“We do not necessarily have to find fossilized remains of early hominids (which will always be rare) to know that hominids consistently occupied an ancient land surface. Behavioral clues, or artefacts, also inform us directly and unambiguously about early hominid occupation. Modifying rocks according to a consistent plan or simply carrying them over fairly long distances is a behavior exhibited by no other animal but a hominid.”
This gives us some idea of why the study of stone tools is important in archaeology.
In the textbook for ARPA 101, Fagan in People of the Earth (2001, 10th edition, pp. 65-66) says:
“Chimpanzees shape termite twigs with their teeth from convenient wood fragments, removing leaves so they can poke the ‘artefact’ down a small hole. Stone tool making requires good hand-eye coordination, the ability to recognize acute angles in stone, and the mental processes necessary to shape one tool by using another. But the Oldowan stoneworkers were carrying out simple tasks: shaping stones so they could hold them in one hand to crack bones, and striking off sharp-edged flakes. Their artefacts defy precise classification in the way that one can subdivide later stone tools into forms such as choppers, scrapers, and knives, for example. Their lumps and flakes display continuous variability, an understanding of basic fracture mechanics, not the ability to impose standardized forms, or to choose easily worked raw materials. Could chimpanzees have made such tools, as has been suggested? When Nicholas Toth tried to train a pygmy chimpanzee named Kanzi to make Oldowan tools, he found that Kanzi could make sharp flakes, but he never mastered the art of recognizing acute angles in stone or of other flaking strategies (Toth et al., 1993).”
Why do you think it is so important to be able to recognise acute angles when flaking rocks? You will consider the answer to this in Reading 2 and Practical 2. Davidson's observation of Panbanisha knapping convinced him that Panbanisha was looking for acute angles to flake.
One of the enduring questions about stone artefacts is about whether they are distinctly human. One of the implications of Toth’s work with Kanzi is that it is not necessary to be human to make stone tools. This was a problem in the early years of the scientific recognition of chimpanzee tool-making, because some people at the time liked to use a fine phrase—“Man the tool-maker”—to sum up some aspects of hominin and human evolution.
In order to understand anything about stone tools, it is essential to have some understanding about how stone tools are made. To help you with this, there is an exercise in Practical 2, and the exercise in Reading 2 is about the mechanical principles that guide stone tool knapping. This may help you to understand the emphasis on acute angles. You should also read Note 2.
You will have an opportunity in Reading 3 to consider the standard story of stone tools in hominin and human evolution, and to consider some of the recent developments in this story in Reading 15. Both of these Readings will be based on a paper of mine that is in press. You might like to contrast this with the simplistic view put by Renfrew and Bahn in the earlier quotation.
But this unit is principally about Australian Stone tools. On one hand, this will be a valuable preparation for the study of stone tools in Australia. On the other hand, if you have a mind to it, this will give you some experience of the study of stone tools so that you can turn to a study of them elsewhere with a good preparation. In Reading 4, you will be asked to consider the evidence for early stone tools in the region from which Australia was colonised.
In looking at Australian stone artefacts, the introduction will be in Readings 5 and 6, based on the current textbook for ABAR 103: Mulvaney and Kamminga The Prehistory of Australia. The relevant parts are reprinted in the Resource Book. Stone axes are one of the most well-known of Australian artefacts. We will consider some archaeological studies of these in Reading 7. As with the standard story of stone tools outside Australia, so with the story in Australia—there are new discoveries and new ideas which mean that much of what has been accepted before will be changing in the next few years. You will have a chance to study this in several of the reading that follow, particularly in Reading 14.
One of the unique advantages of Australian archaeology is that there is some information about stone tools from the ethnography. We will consider this in Readings 8 and 9. One of the questions we will be concerned with in Readings 11 and 12 will be the completeness of our information from ethnography. Reading 10 gives some idea of how archaeology and ethnography may interact.
This unit studies stone artefacts from the beginning to the end in three different ways:
1. From source to site to archaeological report
This aspect is about how we go about studying stone artefacts to turn them into the artefacts of history. People made choices about where to obtain stone and then make the tools. Then they left the artefacts at places that we find as archaeological sites. Our job is to study the stone tools so that they can tell us a story about the people who made those choices and those tools.
The Practicals will introduce you to the techniques we use, but the Readings will provide the essential underpinning of what sorts of stories we write.2. From earliest stone tools to eye surgery
This aspect is not the principal objective of the unit, but we believe strongly that there are important aspects of Australian archaeology that can be best understood from knowing about the history of stone tool making from our earliest ancestors.
Before the advent of laser surgery, there were cases of eye surgeons getting modern knappers to make flakes from obsidian because these gave a sharper edge and a cleaner cut than steel. we do not think this has happened in Australia, but it is the last stage of a 2.5 million year history of making stone tools for use.3. From the infancy of a stone tool maker to their death
This aspect is one of the missing parts of the story. We really know very little about the process by which people learned to make stone tools. We will give it some consideration in Reading 10. In addition, in some places, stone artefacts have obviously been made as objects which carried information within societies through the style in which they were made. We will consider this aspect of stone tools in Reading 13.
Through these reading, we will approach an understanding of the method and theory of studying stone artefacts.
Your success at understanding will be assessed through your answers to questions on the readings, and through the success with which you study the artefacts that will be sent to you. Practical 1 will require you to understand how to recognise important features of stone tools from the drawings of them in publications. Practicals 3, 4, 5 and 6 will be about recognising the different categories that archaeologists have recognised in stone artefacts in Australia. You will learn how to measure artefacts in Practical 7. You will study more detailed aspects of the artefacts themselves in Practical 8. Some of these attributes will be described in the extract from a consultancy report that you have for Reading 11.
Once you have the skills to recognise the artefacts and the features on the artefacts, there is an issue of how you use the information that you have obtained. Approaches to this will be discussed in Practicals 9, 10, 11 and 12. These will assume no knowledge of statistics, but we hope that we can make it easy for you to learn the bits you need to know.