Biomedical Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
familiarity, combined with the archaeologist's (or collector's) selectivity
in picking up, preserving, displaying, publishing, or even selling only
“good examples” of the tool in question.
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Theories of hand-ax use are speculative in many ways; one of the
interesting aspects of this for the historian of science is how views of
their origin and use have multiplied over time. Experimental archaeolo-
gists have given plausibility to some theories, and made certain theories
less plausible; but there is still a great deal of uncertainty, and it may
well be that these tools have had different uses at different points in the
Paleolithic—or among different peoples living at any given time, or
among any single individual making or finding such a stone. Calvin's
theory, for example, is consistent with the growing recognition that a
given tool might have had multiple uses, or might even have once been
one kind of tool and later cannibalized for a novel use. A hand ax made
(or picked up) for use in an antelope hunt, for instance, might have
later been used to disembowel or disarticulate an animal killed in such
a hunt, or to dig a hole in which the animal might be stashed. The tool
might also have been given some ritual or sacred significance, or used
in some sexual or social celebration or rite of passage. Reuse and
refashioning have become objects of interest in recent lithic studies, with
Paleolithic peoples being credited as more flexible and opportunistic
than once thought. Large flakes (axes?) are thought to have become
cores, cores refigured as choppers, choppers were used as cores for
smaller flakes, and so forth. Ancient hominids in this sense may have
been rather more like us—opportunistic and flexible—than is sometimes
thought.
This last-mentioned prospect has made it harder to say for sure what
is a core (waste or resource) and what is a flake (tool), giving rise also
to the suggestion that many so-called hand axes might actually be dis-
carded cores from which flakes were taken. Nicholas Toth has argued
that most Oldowan tools are actually remnant cores, the idea here being
that suitable pebbles would be carried around and then struck whenever
needed to produce a thin, sharp flake. Such flakes are effective cutting
tools, and would serve very well for rapid butchery and excision of
flesh.
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The same could well be true for many of the hand axes found in
Europe, the Middle East, and Africa: their marvelous symmetry might
simply indicate that the core has been exhausted, flakes having been
