The emergence of infrastructure in later prehistory: technique, wonder, and convergence

ABSTRACT

Later prehistory in Eurasia is characterised by a suite of radical new technologies that include metallurgy, writing, and the wheel. Their emergence has often been attributed to the dramatically improved efficiencies they offer. This paper argues that instrumental accounts underplay the aesthetic qualities of technical action that have considerable bearing on how technologies emerge. In archaeology, the aesthetics of techniques finds limited recognition. Here, thinking on ‘cultural techniques’ from media theory, the French tradition in the anthropology of techniques, and notions of skill and learning from ecological psychology are combined to develop the aesthetic perspective required for exploring the relationship between technical action, the experience of technological wonder, and the formation of lasting infrastructures. The paper concludes that some emergent technologies create a convergence of different zones of activity, generating the growing infrastructural integration that characterises later Eurasian prehistory.

KEYWORDS:

• Infrastructure
• technique
• prehistory
• wheel
• metal
• writing

Acknowledgments

This paper emerges in part from a seminar that I organised in Paris at the Fyssen Foundation in December 2015. I am most grateful to the Fyssen for their generous support of this seminar (‘Social and Cognitive Dimensions of Technological Change’), and to the speakers for their contributions. Sander van der Leeuw has been very supportive in reading earlier versions of this paper, and in my work on technology generally. I thank Lambros Malafouris for many inspiring conversations over the years, Ed Swenson for his extremely useful comments on an earlier draft, and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive feedback.

Disclosure statement

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

Notes

1. Childe might also be thought to embody this perspective, though his views changed over time – see Trigger (1986).

2. Consider Ruha Benjamin (2019) on how technologies captivate in two senses – in terms of the imagination, and also in terms of how they entrap.

3. See also ‘technical systems’ as defined by Bertrand Gille – ‘all techniques are dependent upon the others, and this necessarily requires a certain coherence: the coherence within the structures, ensembles and series constitute what could be called a “technical system”’ (Gille 1986, 17).

4. One might recognise, nonetheless, that some technologies actively seek to remain remarkable and refuse gradual withdrawal; some forms of self-consciously spectacular architecture come to mind.

5. This approach then aligns quite closely to the perspective on cognition outlined in Material Engagement Theory (Malafouris 2013); it also helps to reveal the latter’s aesthetic orientation (see also Malafouris 2011).

6. Rietveld and Kiverstein draw on the work of Bol (2012). See also Lehmann (2014) on what oil paint afforded and the need to look at these affordances in elaborating art historical accounts (and not just as ‘technical art history’).

7. an aesthetic turn has created a heightened recognition of everyday aesthetics in artefacts (cf Bonnot 2002; Sheringham 2006; Saito 2007; in archaeology, Skeates 2017), this has not been applied so much to ‘everyday’ technologies. Perhaps the notion that technologies may have an aesthetic too seems counterintuitive. How could a manufacturing technology have an aesthetic? And yet just as everyday objects have their aesthetic side so might the technologies that created them.

8. Here Pandit is drawing in part on Meltzer (2013).

9. Note also in this vein that the aestheticizing of contemporary material culture is tied up with ideas of finitude, ruination, and extinction (on this in art history/philosophy, see Ricco 2014).

10. One might also see links to Gell (1992) on enchantment of technology.

11. Note here too the work of Sophie de Beaune on the aesthetics and beauty of technical action, with particular reference to prehistory. De Beaune (2013).

12. The work of Lechtman, Hosler and Epstein (see discussion in Killick 2004) follows a similar logic.

13. One can trace a similar set of processes in the Aegean too. Although a tradition of tokens for accounting seems absent, seals are in use from the mid-third millennium BC. Early in the second millennium BC two (undeciphered) scripts appear on Crete, Cretan Hieroglyphic and Linear A, and they see close connection with sealing practices in the development of bureaucracy. There is arguably a convergence of image and script systems in the first Aegean bureaucracies. See (Flouda 2013; Karnava 2015; Schoep 2017).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Carl Knappett

Carl Knappett teaches in the Department of Art History at the University of Toronto, where he holds the Walter Graham/ Homer Thompson Chair in Aegean Prehistory. He is an archaeologist interested both in the micro-processes of meaning-making in material culture, and the macro-scale dynamics of interaction within and between communities. To this end he has sought to develop network approaches that have broad applicability for the study of ancient material culture and society. His most recent book is Aegean Bronze Age Art: Meaning in the Making (Cambridge University Press), while earlier publications include Thinking Through Material Culture, and An Archaeology of Interaction. He works on material from various Bronze Age sites across the Aegean and has recently directed a fieldwork project at the Minoan town of Palaikastro in east Crete.