The technique as a symbol in Late Glacial Europe

Abstract

Recent scholars have suggested that a utilitarian approach cannot grasp the sociality of technology. By looking at the technology manufactured and used at the time of the last glacial maximum in France and the Iberian peninsula it is suggested that we need to take account of the ways in which tools are aspects of material culture intimately related to the process of labour. They are a part of the process which creates differential value between particular tasks within hunter‐gatherer groups. The symbolic aspect of technology, however, is not restricted to the external form of their tools ‐ the problem of style in material culture. Symbolism pervades the entire process of manufacture, through the use of a salient set of skills and desires which are common to both technology and other practices within societies. There is no social life of material objects which begins after the process of manufacture has been completed. It can be argued that bifacial thinning techniques employed in the manufacture of certain tools at the last glacial maximum are chosen from among other potential techniques because of a saliency between the skills of precision, timing and strategic planning which are required both in the manufacture of these tools and in the complex subsistence economy in practice at this time.

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