A Global History of The Earlier Palaeolithic by Mark J. White;

Author:Mark J. White; [White;, Mark J.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781032263403
Publisher: TaylorFrancis
Published: 2023-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

All in the Planning: An Organisational Approach to the Acheulean

Binford might not have set out to provide a new model of Lower Palaeolithic human behaviour, but that is precisely what he ultimately achieved. From its origins in evolutionary theory and culture-history, the Palaeolithic had become a science “dedicated to understanding the past and its dynamics through fine-grained study of the processes that brought [the] record into being” (Binford 1987a, 1). It provided a new perspective, and a new type of early human, one not very much like us at all (Binford 1987c). It also came with its own language that a new generation of students would be quick to learn.

Modern humans operated in the world “in such a way that their behaviour was the interface between a technologically aided ‘cultural geography’ and the properties of the natural environment” (Binford 1987c, 18). They modified the natural environment to suit their needs and constructed their own environments (huts, settlements) in which to live. Many animals, however, did not have a cultural geography. They just moved within their natural environment among places where they could obtain the resources vital to survival, not in a random fashion but according to natural structure of the landscape and the distribution of water, vegetation, prey and so on. This could be described as ‘niche geography’.

Narratives involving home bases and food sharing had assumed that early hominins operated within a cultural geography and that their behaviour was culturally organised, a comfortable human origin story for the comfortable middle class archaeologist (Binford 1987c). If the unpleasant debates concerning the Oldowan had shown anything, it was that these assumptions were unfounded (Binford 1989a, 1990). They were no more valid when applied to the Acheulean, which was in organisational terms essentially the same as the Oldowan (Binford 1987c). Both reflected a tool-assisted direct adaptation to the environment (a niche geography), not a culturally constructed environment (a cultural geography).

Several things struck Binford (1983a, 74) as odd about many Acheulean sites: the sheer quantity of stone tools, the fact that most were relatively unmodified through use, the rarity of occupation in caves and rockshelters, and the close association with sources of water. They were clearly palimpsests of many visits to the same place but then why had the occupants continued to bring new raw materials and make new tools, when the floor must have been strewn with old ones that had been minimally used? This did not sound like the behaviour one would expect at a modern hunter-gatherer camp, which were places where tools were maintained and curated and thus tended to accumulate. Modern hunters also tended to leave little evidence of their presence at places where tools were used. The Acheulean showed the total opposite pattern (Binford 1990). Tools were left in greatest abundance at places where they had been used in direct engagement with the environment, the end point of a very short episode of planning. As a thought experiment that was plausible but not necessarily true, Binford (1983a, 75) imagined

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