Análisis Funcional - Arqueoecología Mediterránea - Universitat ...

4. Análisis funcional y producción en las sociedades cazadorasrecolectoras:
significación de los cambios tecnológicos durante
el mesolítico
Abstract
Ermengol Gassiot Ballbè
During the last years the interest about the comprehension of the consumption dinamics in prehistoric societies has
grown. This fact has affected the study of hunter-gatherer societies in different ways. On the one hand, the development
of the functional analysis has provided an increasing empirical evidence about the modalities of use and amortization
of the stone tools. On the other hand, from a liberal perspective, the self-denominated Evolutionary Ecology shows an
special interest in defining the consumption in relation to the individual benefit optimization. In this work, however, an
economical analysis of the Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic populations in the northern Iberian Peninsula is
presented. From an economical materialist theory, we emphasize the necessity of understanding the consumption within
the framework of the social life production. In this proposal the functional analysis provides empirical arguments which
give theoric statements the substantive explanatory nature.
The main argument here defended concerns to the economical signification of the factors consumption in production.
This can happen under the form of use of means and instruments of work to realize a determinated activity and like
consumption means of life by the force of labour. The distinction between objective consumption and subjective
consumption is stablished on the basis of the comprehension of these processes like acts of social transmission of value
and identifying who or what the receiver is. On understanding consumption like an act of production where social value
is amortized and transferred, time becomes a very important variable. It indicates us the length of the utensils' live and
of the time in which the effort implicated in their manufature is socially compensated. Moreover, it conditions the social
production as a whole on stablishing the rhythm of the amortization of factorsí inversion on the food productive cycles
and other goods. This fact demands that the diachronic dimension of the use of the means of prodution is considered in
the analysis of prehistorical productions.
In the last part of the article we present the heuristic potential of this proposal. The study of the technological changes
occured between 14.000 calBC and 5.500 calBC under this prism must not be exclusively understood in relation to the
individual yield of the different kind of artifacts. The way in which these are socially amortized directly falls into the
general trend of the decreasing yields that governs hunter-gatherer economies. It allows a more complex view about the
social production in this period as well as pointing out new explicative causes. We fundamentally justify that, to a
certain extent, the characteristic changes during the Mesolithic in Western Europe can be understood from the same
social production.
El análisis funcional es una vía de aproximación a la
tecnología de una época dada (Semenov 1981). Así
mismo, la determinación de las cualidades técnicas de la
actividad laboral que activa la producción aporta
información no sólo de las características del trabajo
humano en cada período sino también del conjunto de la
organización económica. Para alcanzar este último
objetivo es necesaria la articulación del análisis funcional
como método arqueológico y del análisis económico
como teoría cobertora. A éste último el análisis funcional
aporta su necesaria dimensión empírica y lo traslada al
plano de la realidad concreta. La teoría económica
facilita, a su vez, la capacidad para trascender los
contextos individuales de la observación empírica y
relacionarlos con el conjunto de la actividad social en la
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que se insertan. El análisis del trabajo como capacidad
humana de transformar intencionalmente la materia para
cubrir determinadas necesidades sociales constituye el
argumento para llevar a cabo esta actividad.
Sin embargo, de forma paralela a su popularización
dentro de nuestra disciplina, en varios trabajos se ha
entendido el método funcional fundamentalmente como
una forma para caracterizar el uso particular de los
diferentes objetos líticos que conforman el registro
arqueológico (Grace 1989). Esta visión, restrictiva ya en
el hecho de que excluye una amplia gama de restos
arqueológicos (en cambio, tratados en varias ponencias
de este volumen), limita también el tipo de información
que potencialmente puede aportar el análisis funcional.