Chasing Mirages: Seeking Standardization among Prehistoric Stone Tools

ABSTRACT

This paper asks why we expect to find standardization among prehistoric stone tools. It argues this expectation results from early archaeologists’ experience living in industrialized societies, a wild mismatch with the world their Pleistocene forebears inhabited. It further argues that in searching for evidence of lithic standardization, archaeologists must be alert for “mirages,” things that can create the illusion of standardization. Pre-industrial lithic standardization seems most likely to have emerged from attaching stone tools to handles (“hafting”), and from using stone tools as “passive lithic social media.”

KEYWORDS:

• Stone tools
• lithic standardization
• hafting
• passive lithic social media

Acknowledgements

I thank Justin Pargeter, Huw Groucutt, and Ceri Shipton for inviting my contribution to this special issue of Lithic Technology. Comments from two anonymous reviewers greatly improved an earlier draft of the manuscript. Opinions expressed, omissions, and any errors of fact are my own.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not supported by any funding.

Notes on contributors

John J. Shea

John J. Shea is Professor of Anthropology at Stony Brook University. He is the author of Stone Tools in the Paleolithic and Neolithic Near East: A Guide (2013), Stone Tools in Human Evolution: Behavioral Differences among Technological Primates (2017), Prehistoric Stone Tools of Eastern Africa: A Guide (2020), and The Unstoppable Human Species: The Emergence of Homo sapiens in Prehistory (forthcoming 2023). He is a paleoanthropologist, archaeologist, and an experienced practitioner of ancestral survival skills. Shea’s demonstrations of stoneworking appear in numerous television documentaries and in the United States National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.