Miller Margaret-Louise. Archaeological Approaches to Technology

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xx Preface and Acknowledgements

of a box of obsidian pebbles and a demonstration of bipolar percussion on

my office floor. Julie Solometo kindly shared a written copy of a conference

paper and providing her MA paper, after my enthusiastic reception of her

presentation at the 2000 Chacmool Conference at the University of Calgary.

I hope this discussion of her work will encourage her to publish the full study,

and continue with technology along with her current informative research

into conflict. The graduate class on technology I taught at the Costen Institute

of Archaeology, UCLA, formed the basis for the more theoretically-oriented

graduate course I now regularly teach at Toronto. The hands-on part is the

most interesting, though, and really far more informative for thinking about

technology research, as I’ve found in my independent studies with a number of

undergraduates at Toronto. At UCLA, students from various departments put

together their diverse backgrounds to make for lively discussion and mutual

growth, echoed by a similar graduate class a year later at the University of

Toronto. To all these past students, if this book crosses any of your hands, I

would love to hear what you are doing.

The Cotsen Institute of Archaeology is the place where this incipient book

went completely off-track. Too many interesting things and people, and a

staggering number of archaeological lectures by visitors from all over the world

and right down the hall, opened doors to all sorts of new ideas and thinking.

It has taken me years (literally) to come to grips with the tremendous variety

of stimulations I received during my year as the Cotsen post-doctoral fellow

in 2001–2002. May all researchers have a similarly distracting and stimulating

experience at least once in their lives.

At all these institutions, at conferences, and by email, my peers have dis-

cussed, read, and commented on the various topics covered in this book—far

too many to try to list here. Many, many thanks to all of you, and I hope the

final version has not overlooked too many of your excellent suggestions along

the way. I owe the greatest debt of all to the countless scholars, encountered

in person or only through their writings, whose insights, data, and plain hard

work have provided the background that made this book possible.

Finally, my family has always been supportive of my career choice and

workload, showing particular tact in avoiding the whole topic of “the book”

in family gatherings over the past few years. This book would never have

gone to press without my parents’ early teachings that being wrong is part

of the learning process; I can only imagine how much I have likely gotten

wrong in my determination to look outside my own areas of expertise for

information. (But I’ll take corrections!) Last but definitely not least, Roger

Ivar Lohmann, my fellow graduate student, fellow anthropologist, and now

husband and research partner, patiently read a thousand drafts, discussed

everything from the definition of material culture to the typology of looms,

offered advice and encouragement, and did far more than his share of the

Preface and Acknowledgements xxi

cooking and housework. He was particularly good at reminding me to discuss

consumption as well as production, as I definitely have a tendency to focus

on the latter. I want to thank him (I think) for his many difficult questions

and requests for clarifications as this book was being written.

Heather Margaret-Louise Miller

Anthropology, University of Toronto

Almost every statement in prehistory should be qualified by the phrase: “On

the evidence available today the balance of probability favours the view that.”

The reader is hereby requested to insert this or some similar reservation in

most of my statements.

(Childe 1981 [1956]: 24)

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CHAPTER

Introduction:

Archaeological Approaches

to Technology

 producers were necessarily interconnected through com-

plex webs of interaction and inter-dependence.

(Sinopoli 2003: 6)

Each craftsman was dependent on his brother craftsmen of

different trades in order to be able to carry out his own trade.

(Seymour 1984: 13)

The study of technology has always had a major role in the practice of archae-

ology. In all world areas and time periods, from every theoretical perspective,

archaeologists have studied the ways in which people make things and interact

with made things. Libraries of books have been written on topics including

flintknapping, craft specialization, exchange networks, value, pottery classifi-

cation, prestige goods, style, and artisans’ roles in society. Given this volume

of research, it is not surprising that most archaeological technology studies

have focused on a particular technology, such as textile production or metal

working. This is necessary for a deep understanding of particular technologies,

given the complexity of the topics.

However, we do lose something by this necessary approach, and that is the

ability to look at ancient technology from the perspective of multiple tech-

nologies. I was fortunate to be trained by a technology generalist, Jonathan

Mark Kenoyer, who was sometimes disconcertingly adept at a variety of tech-

nologies. His assumption that one should investigate many technologies rather

than being expert in one or two had a profound influence on my own choice of

subject, the comparative study of Indus civilization pyrotechnologies. I have

Heather M.-L. Miller: Archaeological Approaches to Technology

2 Heather M.-L. Miller: Archaeological Approaches to Technology

found such a broad perspective to be tremendously useful, if somewhat over-

whelming. With this book, I hope to allow others to look for insights revealed

by comparison between technologies, in combination with (not as a replace-

ment for) the more usual focus on specific technologies.

Archaeologists tend to classify technologies into “crafts” or “industries”

based at least partially on material or end-product type: clay vessel (pottery)

production, metal working, basket making, stone object (lithics) production,

woodworking, textile manufacture. This is in large part a result of having to

classify objects without necessarily knowing their function, and is an essential

part of the reality of archaeological research. Such groupings work very well

for some cases, and are worth investigating from a theoretical as well as a

practical perspective, as is shown in Chapters 3 and 4. But such material-

based groupings can be counterproductive. Especially in cases with few textual

records, it is rather rare for archaeological technology specialists to focus on

technologies based on process or functional groupings such as transportation,

luxury goods, communication, mining, or even agriculture (food production).

This makes the transition within archaeology from collected data to social

interpretation even more difficult. In addition, the general data-collection

focus on groupings based on material or end-product as opposed to process

or function is in great contrast to the focus of researchers in other fields, such

as historians of technology, and can make discussion across disciplines rather

difficult. Both such topic-focused studies and multi-craft comparative studies

can help to ease such boundary crossings, by allowing movement away from

a material-type focus and toward social interpretation as an ultimate goal, as

I illustrate in Chapters 5 and 6.

This book is intended to allow archaeologists and others to obtain an

introduction to production techniques and analytic approaches for many

crafts or industries, and to show how archaeological specialists have used

technology studies to address a wide variety of social questions about our

ancestors. As this book is intended for a wide audience, I deliberately use

as little discipline-specific terminology as possible, in order to accommodate

readers from a wide variety of backgrounds, including specialists in different

technologies. For example, pottery technology specialists and metal technology

specialists use quite different vocabularies, obscuring those similarities that

do exist between these crafts. Where technical terminology is necessary,

I provide general definitions or make definitions clear from context, with

references for further reading. I am thus using an explicitly comparative

approach, and painting with very broad strokes. The references within the

text are intended to provide entrances into more detailed and case-specific

approaches, as well as a limited entry to the extensive literature on technology

in languages other than English. I myself am an anthropological archaeologist,

Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Technology 3

so am most familiar with literature from this field, but I have drawn on

discussions by archaeologists in other disciplines as well.

TERMINOLOGY

Definitions can be used to set up terms of reference, and then employed in

the investigation of a problem. This is how definitions are usually perceived

and applied. However, defining a term can itself be part of the investigation

of a problem. In the latter case, what a term means can only be revealed once

we understand the full extent of the issue it symbolizes, and the process of

creating a definition is how we go about investigating and solving an issue.

I tend to follow this second practice. I use the process of defining something

as a way to explore various facets of an issue or problem, so I am perfectly

comfortable with shifting and negotiating terminology as I think through a

topic. This is a method I frequently use in teaching of all sorts of archaeological

topics, from political organization to technology. Therefore, I have no interest

in using this volume to create a definitive account of how technology has

been and should be studied in archaeology. Rather, I am far more interested in

exploring the range of archaeological approaches to technology, particularly

by organizing these approaches to allow comparisons across types of crafts.

We must have some common points of reference to begin, however. Dobres

(2000: 47–95) offers a detailed discussion of the philosophical and historical

definitions of “technology” and its roots, noting how diverse these defini-

tions have been. In this book, I have instead employed a rough definition

based on the way modern students of ancient technology tend to use the

term, particularly within archaeology. The multiplicity of uses of the term

technology has derived from the variety of approaches employed in the anal-

ysis of ancient technology. One line of this ancestry is the long-term interest

in gesture and body posture during the production process, going back to

Mauss and Leroi-Gourhan (Lemonnier 1992; van der Leeuw 1993). Another

line is that of materials-based analyses by specialists in archaeology, the sci-

ences and the arts, going back to Cyril Stanley Smith and others (Hodges

1989 [1976]; Kingery 1996, 2001). These lines overlap and interconnect;

there is a long tradition of placing production within a social setting, of look-

ing at the people making and using the pots that archaeologists find. For

example, in Artifacts, one of the few archaeological single-volume works cov-

ering a multiplicity of technologies, Hodges (1989 [1976], originally 1964)

distinguished technology from the study of stylistic details of artifacts. By

this, he implied that technology was about the process of production rather

than the endpoint (objects). Subsequent scholars such as Schiffer and Skibo

(1987) and Lemonnier (1986; 1992), studying technology from quite different

4 Heather M.-L. Miller: Archaeological Approaches to Technology

perspectives, noted as components of technology both the actual manipulation

of physical objects and the shared (or secret) human knowledge involved.

Merrill (1977:vi; also 1968) explicitly referred to technology as “the culture

surrounding the actions or activities involved in making or doing things.”

Researchers in a variety of disciplines have increasingly stressed the nature

of technology as practice, as ways of doing or making something, of organizing

work and people into systems involving new words and new mindsets as well

as new tools (e.g., Lechtman 1977; Lechtman and Steinberg 1979; U. Franklin

1992; Basalla 1990; Lemonnier 1992, 1993; Pfaffenberger 1992; Kingery 1993,

1996; Dobres and Hoffman 1995, 1999; McCray 1998; Schiffer 2001). That

is, we add not only hands but also faces and minds to our study of the way

things are made. To go even farther, Franklin (1992) specifically discussed

technology as ways of doing something rather than simply ways of making

something (that is, creating an object), so that there are technologies of prayer

and of storytelling as well as of pottery production and weaving. This returns

us to Leroi-Gourhan’s view of dance as a technology; gesture as well as material

culture is important. In short, the archaeological study of technology employs

a decidedly holistic approach. Kingery (1993) notes that for archaeologists and

art historians, the term technology generally brings to mind the production

process, whereas historians and philosophers of technology usually think of

the design process. This difference is in large part based on their respective

materials of study, which in the past traditionally included differences in

data sources (object vs. text), scales of production and distribution (single

objects or small-scale vs. large-scale production), and to some degree time

periods (pre-historic vs. historic). Increasingly, members of these disciplines

have bridged these differences over the past few decades. Albeit still in progress

and not without its problems, the resulting examination of the entire process

of technology, including the social context, is one of the most exciting trends

in the study of technology.

As this is a book about many approaches, I am rather broad in my definition

of basic terms, rather than trying to give a more narrow definition that may not

fit some of the thematic studies discussed. Of necessity, there will be some flu-

idity in my use of terms. So to begin with basics, what do I mean by technology?

I think of technology in the context of an outwardly expanding, nested set

of actions and relationships: from production itself, to the organization of the

production process, to the entire cultural system of processes and practices

associated with production and consumption. “Technology” is commonly used

to refer to each of these sets, perhaps because the study of ancient technology

has developed from so many different perspectives, or perhaps because the

everyday use of the term technology also has a wide variety of meanings,

as consultation of any dictionary will indicate. To clarify my discussions,

Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Technology 5

I will define terms to distinguish between these nested sets of actions and

relationships, although the boundaries between these sets are blurred.

Production is the actual process of fabrication or creation, including both the

material objects involved and the techniques or gestures used. Rice’s (1996b:

173) “manufacturing” and Costin’s (1998b: 3–4) “crafting” are roughly equiv-

alent terms, but I have chosen production to allow consistency with the enor-

mous literature on the “organization of production.” Furthermore, although

both manufacturing and crafting can be explicitly defined and used as refer-

ring to the creation of objects from start to finish, I find that manufacturing

often conjures up an image of factory-style workers participating in a segment

of an object’s production, while crafting tends to provoke an image of indi-

vidual artisans designing and creating an object from start to finish. Although

the image of “production” is often closer to that of manufacturing, I incor-

porate both of these images in my use of production. The term technology

itself is often used to mean the same thing as my term production, both in

everyday speech and by specialists, particularly in reference to techniques

of fabrication or production. The discussions of the sequence of stages by

which objects are produced (production sequence or chaîne opératoire), as

presented in Chapters 3 and 4, relate to both production and the organization

of production as well as the life-histories of objects.

I define organization of production as the organizational arrangement within

which production takes place. This may refer to one artisan working on an

object from start to finish, or it may refer to a system of specialist workers,

managers, and materials procurers. The many discussions of craft specializa-

tion in the archaeological literature falls within in this category. Although the

social and economic aspects of the organization system are usually empha-

sized, ideological attitudes from politics or religion can also have a major

impact on the organization of production. The term technology is also some-

times used to refer to the organization of production; for example, Franklin

(1992: 18–20) distinguishes between holistic technologies and prescriptive

technologies as methods of organization of production that parallel the dis-

tinction between crafting and manufacturing noted for production above.

In this book, I use technological systems or just technology primarily in

the broadest sense, to refer to the active system of interconnections between

people and objects during the creation of an object, its distribution, and to

some extent its use and disposal. In other words, technology or technological

systems can be roughly described as the processes and practices associated

with production and consumption, from design to discard. Consumption

(including distribution, use, and disposal) is thus included in a technological

system, as it should be, given the strong links between production and con-

sumption on a number of levels as illustrated throughout this volume. This

characterization of a technological system is a useful shorthand for a complex

6 Heather M.-L. Miller: Archaeological Approaches to Technology

term, if not a precise definition. It derives primarily from more complete dis-

cussions by Franklin (1992), Kingery (1993; 2001), and Lemonnier (1992).

Pfaffenburger’s (1992) “sociotechnic system” is similar to my use of the term

technological system. While many archaeologists would apply production,

organization of production, and technology strictly to the creation of physical

objects, I favor Franklin’s (1992), Walker’s (2001), and Sinopoli’s (2003) sug-

gestions that these terms can also refer to the creation of non-objects, such as

music, dance, rituals, and poetry.

In contrast with the process-oriented focus of technology, I use the term

material culture to refer to the interactions between people and objects (usually

finished products). This includes both the ways in which people perceive

objects and react to their culturally prescribed meanings, as well as the ways

in which people give meaning to objects. As in the short-hand definition for

technology, this is at best a rough approximation of the uses of a complex

term. It has the added advantage of probably satisfying no specialist in the

topic, so I do not privilege one current mode of thought over another. Readers

can explore more precise (and contradictory) definitions in a number of recent

books and collections (e.g., D. Miller 1985; Lubar and Kingery 1993; Kingery

1996; Chilton 1999; Glassie 1999; Schiffer and Miller 1999), and the recently-

established Journal of Material Culture. The use of the term material culture

has often been linked strongly to discussions of technology, as in Lechtman

and Merrill’s (1977) edited volume, Material Culture: Styles, Organization, and

Dynamics of Technology. Although definitions and degrees of linkage have

varied, almost all summary volumes on crafts or materials, such as those

referenced in Chapters 3 and 4, employ case studies related both to material

culture studies and technology studies.

Archaeologists, although hotly debating its exact meaning, are generally

comfortable with the use of the term material culture. Perhaps in large part

this is because it is our starting point—ultimately, our work comes down

to dealing with the associations between surviving “things” and past people.

However, other scholars, especially other anthropologists, still have reserva-

tions about the term, and a short exploration of this issue is revealing. For

one thing, the term “culture” itself has been one of the most debated terms

in anthropology—defining technology is easy in comparison. The very use

of this term thus rouses shades of disquiet. Beyond this, material culture is

sometimes seen as implying a potentially sloppy equation of culture with

objects, something archaeologists have worried about for decades. It is there-

fore particularly important to emphasize that material culture is not the same

thing as “objects.” Material culture is about interactions between people and

things, and especially about information encoded in things. This is a sensible

perspective for those who define culture as information learned and trans-

mitted to others, consciously or unconsciously, which is at least a portion of

Introduction: Archaeological Approaches to Technology 7

most definitions of culture. If culture is contained in information stored in

human memories and passed on to others, then information stored in written

documents and conveyed into human memories must also be seen as culture.

Artifacts of all types also encode information, which can similarly be con-

veyed to human memories. From this we can describe material culture as the

information encoded in and expressed by human use of objects. Whether the

meaning conveyed to others is the same as the original meaning intended by

the maker or user is a problem, of course, but this is the case for all forms of

information communication. Note that objects may be used to simultaneously

record and express cultural information, a point of much discussion in the lit-

erature on material culture, as well as the archaeological literature on style, as

discussed in Chapter 5. This point also pertains to a more general discussion

about defining culture as information. One part of the debate about culture

refers to the existence of culture in two forms: an unexpressed form as a (men-

tal or physical) record of information at the individual level, and an expressed

form as objects, behaviors, or discourse at both the individual and group

levels. Materializing culture, or the process of creating material objects (that

is, technology), is one way that shareable, learned information is expressed,

parallel to communicating information through speech and behavior.

So for the purposes of this book, I will use the following terminology.

Both technology studies and material culture studies use the investigation of

“things” to understand past and present societies. Material culture studies tend

to focus on the interactions between people and (finished) objects, while tech-

nology studies tend to focus on the human practices and processes associated

with (object) production. However, this distinction is blurred in application

as researchers often study both processes and finished objects, particularly in

examining the life histories of objects. Studies of the way people think and

speak about production and the organization of production also link the study

of technology and the study of material culture. If not the same entity, the

two are yin and yang—one cannot be understood without an awareness of the

other, as Lemonnier has stressed (1992: 2–3).

ARCHAEOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY STUDIES

What does the archaeological study of technology have to contribute to the

broader study of technology and material culture? The most obvious contri-

bution of archaeology is that of a broad perspective, which can either follow

a particular society through time or range across many societies. It provides

information about the development and acceptance of new objects and new

production techniques, and about changes in past economies, social struc-

tures, and political organizations in relation to the invention or adoption of