From Artifacts to Cultures: Technology, Society, and Knowledge in the Upper Paleolithic

The creation of cultural taxonomies has been a common feature of European Paleolithic archaeology since its inception nearly two centuries ago. Endeavoring to establish a scientific basis for the fledgling discipline, early prehistorians adopted the practices of paleontologists and biological systematists for artifacts recovered from Paleolithic sites. However, the absence of robust conceptual frameworks for cultural evolution and lack of common analytical protocols led to inconsistent terminology, idiosyncratic classifications, and weak links between the archaeological record, human behavior, and culture. This history continues to plague Paleolithic archaeology, hindering sophisticated research on human ecology, obscuring the processes that drove cultural and technological evolution, and making regional-scale syntheses nearly impossible. Pleistocene prehistory can certainly benefit from more consistent and transparent classification practices, common and well-defined terminology, and more replicable quantification. However, there are also fundamental conceptual issues underlying Paleolithic cultural taxonomies and their meaning that cannot be resolved by better analytical practices alone. We discuss the cultural, social, and technological processes responsible for pattern in the archaeological record. We focus on the typological systematics commonly used to measure variation within and among lithic assemblages, the socio-ecological-technological processes that generated that variation, and the complex relationships between assemblage characteristics and the nature of cultural knowledge transmission in social contexts. We conclude with a discussion of the usefulness of cultural taxonomies for the research objectives of twenty-first century Paleolithic archaeology.