Going after the new without reinventing the wheel: On the necessity of learning and teaching different approaches to lithic analysis

Abstract

Brazilian archaeology developed following the same phases that the discipline as a whole went through: an initial emphasis on Historical Culturalism, followed by criticism that culminated in a range of possibilities, from the indiscriminate rejection of everything that had been done before, to a more balanced stance with the incorporation of new concepts. Specifically, we can say that there was a schism between the first professional archaeologists, interested in building historical-cultural knowledge, who sought to understand artefactual variability based on the shapes and possible functions of artifacts, and a younger generation guided by the Processualist approach, who started from the principle that the diversity of stone tools would reflect the relationship between man and environment and could be understood based on the different manufacturing techniques. Over time, criticism of the use of morphological approaches led to technology becoming a supposedly superior and more suitable method of analysis for the characterization of lithic artifacts. In Brazilian archaeological research, this reasoning has been consolidated over time and, consequently, limited not only the use of other perspectives, which could be complementary to the characterization of artifacts, but also the identification of distinct cultural groups. Considering that technological analysis understands that there are several steps involved in the manufacturing process of lithic tools and that the development of these activities occurs in an orderly manner, within a certain time and space, we present in this article some approaches that deal with the notion of Models of Sequence (Bleed 2001). The main objective is to show that even if they consider the development of activities as a process that occurs in an orderly manner, similar concepts are not necessarily substantially identical. To begin the discussion about the different approaches, we first deal with the French method called chaîne opératoire, certainly the most recognized in Brazil. Possibly, its establishment in Brazilian literature is due to successive years of teaching, learning and reproduction of key concepts, without major investment in improving and applying other methods. To this end, we discuss the North American-influenced analysis model called Reduction Sequence, exploring basic concepts capable of differentiating it from the French school. Next, we present the method called Minimum Analytical Nodule Analysis, an approach focused on the macroscopic observation of the raw material, operationalized in a very similar way to the refitting method. Subsequently, we explored the Japanese concept called Gihō, aimed at analysing laminar industries. In conclusion, we draw a parallel between these approaches, showing that some of them require a specific context to be applied or even that their inferences will only be possible in the long term and from dense collections.