WEAVING SIMPLE SOLUTIONS TO COMPLEX PROBLEMS: AN EXPERIMENTAL STUDY OF SKILL IN BIPOLAR COBBLE-SPLITTING

Abstract

Bipolar technology has a complicated history in lithics research. Ethnography shows that this method comprises many different techniques, is multi-purpose and skill dependent. However, archaeological interpretations oscillate between bipolar technology being simple, inefficient, and independent of skill to it being a purposeful strategy deployed by experienced knappers. Here we test the role of skill in quartz cobble collection and bipolar cobble-splitting by experienced and inexperienced knappers. Our results demonstrate that cobble collection and splitting are skill dependent, requiring abstract knowledge for collection and physical skill for splitting. Experts selected significantly different cobbles than novices, and split them more reliably and efficiently. Overlap between some experts and novices suggested these participants possessed innate cobble-splitting skills. These results challenge the idea that simple technologies require little skill, and suggest that skill may influence the formation of platform and bulb attributes commonly used to identify bipolar reduction in archaeological assemblages.

La technologie bipolaire a une histoire compliquée dans le monde de recherche lithique. L’ethnographie montre que cette méthode comprend beaucoup de techniques différentes, est multi-usager, et dépend du niveau de compétence. Cependant, les interprétations archéologiques vacillent entre un regard de la technique bipolaire comme une méthode simple, inefficace et indépendant de compétence à un regard du stratagème utilisé par les personnes expérimentées de la taille sur enclume. Dans cet article nous examinons le rôle de niveau de compétence de la collection des galets de quartz et la fracture des galets bipolaires par les personnes avec et sans expérience. Nos résultats montrent que la collection et la fracture des galets dépendent fortement sur la compétence et demandent une connaissance abstraite pour la collection et une compétence physique pour la fracture. Les experts sélectionnent des galets très différents de ceux des débutants, et les fracturent dans une manière plus efficace et fiable. Un chevauchement entre quelques experts et débutants suggère que ces participants possédaient des compétences naturelles pour la fracture des galets. Ces résultats mettent au défi l’idée que les technologies simples demandent peu de compétence, et suggèrent que la compétence peut influencer la formation des caractéristiques de plateforme et de bulbe utilisé pour identifier la réduction bipolaire dans les assemblages archéologiques.

Keywords:

• Bipolar technology
• Cobble-splitting
• Skill
• Experimental archaeology

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank members of the Institute for Long Island Archaeology (Mark Tweedie, Daria Merwin, Mike Lenardi, and David Bernstein) for giving us access to the archaeological materials from Eagles Nest, and for providing their expertize regarding the site and its broader archaeological context. We also thank all of the participants who devoted their time to this study. Thank you to John Shea for his editorial comments and input regarding the experimental design, and to Jeroen Smaers for advising us in our statistical methods. Finally, we are grateful to the editor and our anonymous reviewers for their comments that have helped us improve this final paper.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Hilary Duke

Hilary Duke is a doctoral candidate in the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York and holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council doctoral fellowship. She has received her B.Sc. in psychology and archaeology and M.Sc. in archaeology from the University of Toronto in Canada. Her research focuses on the origins of façonnage (“shaping”) in Plio-Pleistocene lithic technology, considering its implications for the evolution of hominin cognition and skill. She is currently a member of the West Turkana Archaeological Project.

Justin Pargeter

Justin Pargeter is a doctoral candidate in the Interdepartmental Doctoral Program in Anthropological Sciences at Stony Brook University in New York and holds an honorary research fellowship with the Department of Anthropology and Development Studies at the University of Johannesburg, South Africa. Justin received his M.Sc. degree from the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg, after which he gained teaching experience in Malawi, central Africa, helping to establish the first archaeology degree program in this country. His doctoral dissertation research focuses on testing the role of ecological risk in microlith production variability during MIS 2 in southern Africa. Justin is also currently the lithicist for the P5 Pondoland research and exploration project in South Africa.