Stone Tools, Style, and Social Identity: an Evolutionary Perspective on the Archaeological Record

Because of their prevalence in the archaeological record, chipped stone assemblages have long been used for the identification of social entities and the tracing of cultural relationships through space and time. To do this, archaeologists have focused primarily on variations in lithic morphology. Although the forms of stone artifacts are determined by a combination their utilitarian function, 'style', and the physical constraints of knapping different cryptocrystalline rocks, there is widespread belief that style provides the best information about social group membership. Style, however, is not a unified concept, including both passive variability resulting from stochastic processes and actively encoded social information, constrained by selection and manipulated by the makers and users of artifacts. A neo-Darwinian framework is used to evaluate differing concepts of style and their applicability to the lithic archaeological record. Identifying prehistoric social entities and tracing cultural relationships is loosely analogous, methodologically and theoretically, to identifying taxa and tracing ancestor/descendant relationships in biology. Lithic technology is also examined from the point of view of neo-Darwinian evolutionary theory to identity sources of morphological variability most likely to mark group social identity, and suggest methodologies best able to identify and differentiate prehistoric social groups. INTRODUCTION 1970; see also Dibble 1995) over the meaning of variability in Middle Paleolithic assemblages. Similar debates have Since the discovery of the first recognized human focused on North American projectile point forms ancestor in the Neander Valley of Germany nearly 150 (Bettinger, O'Connell, & Thomas 1991; Thomas 1986, years ago, archaeologists have been concerned with the Flenniken & Wilke 1989, Flenniken & Raymond 1986, identity of prehistoric individuals and the social groups Wilke & Flenniken 1991, Rondeau 1996, Hoffman 1985) in which they lived. For the preagricultural economies and Eurasian microliths (Neeley & Barton 1994, Barton that represent most of the human past, stone artifacts& Neeley 1996, Kaufman 1995, Goring-Morris 1996, primarily spatial and temporal variation in the macroHenry 1996, Clark 1996). In general these discussions scopic form of these artifacts-comprise the predominant have focused on the causes and interpretation of variform of behavioral residue used to reconstruct prehisability in stone artifact forms. Also crucial to these detoric social identity. bates, however, is the notion of group-level social idenIn recent decades, the ability of morphological tity (sometimes referred to as 'ethnicity'), and to what variability in stone artifacts to permit reliable inference extent it can be recognized in the archaeological record, of social identity has been increasingly questioned, leadNeo-Darwinian evolutionary theory provides a ing to a series of debates in the archaeological literature, means to explore the inference of social identity with The best known of these debates was between Lewis reference to stone technology in particular and material Binford and Francois Bordes (Binford 1973, Binford & culture in general. While the focus here is on the hunter/ Binford 1966, Bordes 1973, Bordes & de Sonneville Bordes gatherer societies that comprise most of the human past