Session: #522

Regular session

Lithics, thanks to preservation bias, are the most commonly occurring artefacts on prehistoric sites and are regarded as essential technology in human (pre)history. From fire-making to hide-working, knapped lithic artefacts have played a fundamental part in everyday human life for millions of years. Studies of lithics have historically focussed on geological variation, typologies, mechanical functionality, and related spatial questions concerning intra- and inter-site variation. In the last four decades, the social dimensions of lithics have been recognised and articulated in various ways; perhaps most successfully through studies of technological chaîne opératoire and artefact biographies. Ethnohistorical accounts reveal that even stone caught up in mundane tasks reveals different configurations of the world: tracing the interactions between people and stone reveals ways places and materials were understood and expressed. With the latter in mind, how do we move beyond reductive functional accounts and explore the social agency of lithics (as has been proposed for plants, humans, and animals)? In this session we welcome contributions that explore new ontological frameworks for knapped lithic artefacts, acknowledging their role as active participants, capable of extending and transforming bodies, and on occasion, interacting as gendered, sentient beings.

Palaeolithic, Mesolithic, Lithic ontologies, Social agency

no

no

no

no

no

PaM

Aimée Little (United Kingdom) ^1,2

Chantal Conneller (United Kingdom) ³
Astrid Nyland (Norway) ⁴