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A genealogy of reflexivity: the skilled lithic craftsman as “scientist”
in modern eras, important social arenas for cultural reproduction. But the
site is thus also a place of tension and therefore promotes cultural change.
Material culture, functioning as vital parts of this communication, not least,
as I will show below, as references to the ancestral past, will then be active
both in conserving structure and in inducing change (Weiner 1992), or as
Mark Edmonds says in talking about lithics;
“... The creation of technolog y, the form that it takes, and the manner of its subsequent
deployment, serve as powerful media through which people reproduce some of
the basic categories of their social and material world. For the same reason, traditions
of making and using may also serve as a point of departure in the negotiation
of new relations and new meanings.
Thus, we have to situate and understand the activities (technological) within
the larger, meaningful social practices of which they are part and, above all,
link them to material representations.
sion to ancestors or cultural heroes, the dramatis personae in important nar
situations of crisis, must have become “unfamiliar“ and thus had to be rede
reintroducing them into and helping to formulate the logic of a new cul
tural code, a new origin and a logic balancing the structure of social reality
sweeps of recursiveness are solidly material, as it is the enduring nature of
material culture that makes possible life on a scale greater than that of the
individual” (Gosden 1994:137).
The past is thus also radically material and thus an aspect of the structu
res that “constrain, direct and help our day to day activities” (Olsen 2003:88)
the physical world”. But this is not all, as I have tried to argue; this physical
world, these traces of past events, are not always embedded as a past with us
duction as a past before us. As such, despite the fact that they have been de
prived of most of their original cultural explanations causing a split between
the structures (including material culture) of the social reality and cultur
ally conditioned behaviours, they still as signs “constrain, direct and help”.
They are involved in social interaction as agents. As lithic analysts we un
derstand these constraints in the form of debitage characteristics informing
us about concepts of method technique. Their physical appearances are thus
not open to any interpretation. Their new lives as agents are thus formed
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