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Jan Apel and Kjel Knutsson
how this knowledge can be transformed into the skill to read stones from
prehistoric assemblages. This is a skill that to some degree can be learned
and used in archaeological analysis by people not capable of actually making
the artefacts. However, this would probably not have been a meaningful
option in the past, unless the skills of reading the material environment
included stones from variable cultural and time contexts were part of a ne
cessary cultural knowledge. Examples of the need to or ability to read stones
in the past as part of cultural reproduction are discussed by Knutsson and
Högberg. We do not know whether this was only a cultural skill related to
might have been a skill that was valued, for example in discussing relics rela
ted to ancestral events at sacred places or on a more mundane scale, related
to the general ability to track friends and strangers in the cultural landscape
covered with lithic debris from different times and places.
The cultural skill of using knowledge of technology and material culture
to communicate important aspects of the world to members of your group
must thus be understood as one aspect of skill that does not necessarily re
this in relation to the present situation. The skill of the lithic craftsman per
se is not valid for the reproduction of individuals in the culture of science.
The lithic craftsmen are mainly reproducing themselves outside the acad
emy. This practical knowledge has to be transformed into usable assets in a
cultural value system, in this case the culture of science. This transforma
tion may take different paths from sheer theft of symbolic capital to a more
humble use of references.
Theoretical aspects
The seven papers in this section may represent another form of skill that
is effective in a different setting. Here, the cultural skill of knowing how
ing this in social reproduction within academia. Theoretical skills related to
knowledge; it is just different and less concrete.
science and modernity in general, play an essential part in all human cultural
nologies was a decisive element in the implementation of cultural change in
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