Stone Tools: A window into our cultural origins
Stone tools reflect archetypal human behaviors; they are pragmatic, the skills to make and use them are not genetically transmitted and must be learnt, and their production requires varying degrees of planning and problem-solving skills. They enable humans to do what cannot be accomplished with teeth and nails alone. As a result, stone tools have literally shaped the course of human (pre)history.
From at least 3.4 million years ago to historic periods, humans and their ancestors used stone as a raw material for tool production. Archeologists find stone tools on all the planet’s habitable landmasses, even in its cold and ecologically sparse Arctic regions. Their ubiquity and durability inform archeologists about important dimensions of human behavioral variability. Stone tools’ durability also gives them the ability to contribute to the study of long-term historical processes and the deeper regularities and continuities underlying cultural change. Over the last two millennia as ceramics, livestock, European goods, and eventually Europeans themselves arrived in southern Africa, stone tools remained. As social, environmental, economic, and organizational upheavals buffeted African hunter-gatherers, they used stone tools to persist in often marginal landscapes. Indigenous Africans’ persistence in the environment of their evolutionary origins is due in large part to these “small things forgotten.” Stone tools and their broader contexts of use provide one important piece of information to address some of archaeology and history’s “big issues,” such as resilience in small-scale societies, questions of human mobility and migrations, and the interactions of humans with their environments.
A stone tool is, in the most general sense, any tool made either partially or entirely out of stone. The two primary forms of stone tools are ground stone (coarse-grained stone ground either purposely or incidentally) and flaked stone (sharp-edged flakes struck from nodules of rock). Most flaked-stone tool assemblages (groups of stone tools) comprise five basic components: cores, flakes, retouched tools, percussors, and ground stone
Cores are rocks with evidence for the removal of flakes on their surfaces. Percussors are used to initiate fractures on cores. Flakes are sharp-edged objects detached from cores by fracture. Retouched tools are flakes or flake fragments whose edges are modified by removing smaller flakes along their periphery. Ground stone comprises nodules of rock with surfaces shaped through abrasion or pecking and whose surfaces are typically used to process plant foods or to crush materials.
The rocks and minerals most suitable for flaked stone tool production are brittle and uniform, allowing them to deform under pressure and to fracture predictably and reliably. Quartz, quartzite, flint, and obsidian are suitable for stone-tool making, but talc, chalk, and limestone typically are not. Suitable rocks are not universally available, nor do they necessarily occur in the same parts of the landscape as the other key resources (water, shelter, food). Archaeological evidence shows that humans often organized their movements and settlement strategies in order to access high-quality rocks for stone-tool production. Local rocks (sourced within c. 3–6 miles of a site) dominate most stone-tool assemblages, and archeologists usually focus on variations in distances of non-local rocks. Our ongoing raw material surveys in Pondoland, for example, show a highly mobile and diversified hunter-gatherer population accessed Hornfels (a contact metamorphic rock) from across the landscape and in cobble form along the region’s coastlines
Archeologists have spent considerable time and effort to understand the possible range of prehistoric stone-tool production strategies. These strategies may inform toolmakers’ decision-making processes, their motor capabilities, and the social contexts in which this information was transmitted and practiced.
Studies of production methods rely on rare ethnographic observations and on experimental evidence derived by replicating possible toolmaking scenarios and then carefully “reading” the resulting stone-tool evidence. Drawing from these direct observations, archeologists identify four major strategies broadly representative of the long-term evolution of stone-tool production. These are direct percussion on an anvil, in-hand or freehand percussion, pressure flaking, and punch percussion:
Our studies of Pondoland’s stone tools show toolmakers relied mainly on direct percussion on an anvil and freehand percussion for their tool production.
Approaches to understanding stone tools:
Technological approaches document differences in stone-tool production strategies. Archeologists wishing to pursue technological studies draw on several different methods that include rejoining flakes to the cores from which they were struck, measuring and describing features on cores and flakes, conducting microscopic analyses on these products, and deducing aspects of the technological process from experimental observations.
By examining technological constraints on tool production due to tool function, cultural contexts, and raw material acquisition, we can think about ways in which lithic technologies might vary differently in different hunter-gatherer groups and in different regions. Thus, by learning about lithic technological strategies through detailed studies of large collections of stone tools, we can better understand how ancient hunter-gatherers organized their lithic technologies. Focusing on these more common but less flashy aspects of lithic technology provides holistic understandings of its integration into prehistoric economic and social activities.
Archeologists have also applied experimental approaches to better understand the different contexts of stone-tool production and to aid in identifying technological variables important for stone tools’ use. They have provided direct insight into issues such as the roles of raw material variability, task specific activities, social learning mechanisms, and how these factors interact to generate variability in the archaeological record. Our research in Pondoland is pioneering efforts to use experimental archaeology with modern coastal foraging populations to understand how stone tools were used to extract nutrients from rich marine environments and to better integrate these data in explanations of the human behavioral ecology of Pondoland’s prehistoric inhabitants.