Learning from Stone: Using Lithic Artifacts to Explore the Transmission of Culture at Bridge River, British Columbia
Presentation Type
Oral Presentation
Abstract/Artist Statement
Inherent in all tool-making traditions is the necessity of passing along required knowledge, both technological and cultural. This is an uncontroversial statement, but a difficult premise to study archaeologically due to the intangibility of the transmission process. Lithic, or stone, tools provide a useful angle from which to approach cultural transmission, as they leave distinct archaeological traces and require specific cultural knowledge to produce. The Bridge River site, a mostly pre-contact pithouse village in British Columbia, has yielded a collection of stone projectile points, which range from expertly crafted to crude and unfinished. Using these projectile points, this project seeks to piece together the process by which novice toolmakers were taught to knap.
Using the existing literature surrounding the process of learning to knap, a series of diagnostic qualities of novice lithic artifacts can be drawn up and established. Based on technological traits, these diagnostics can be applied to any lithic assemblage as a starting point for determining the possible presence of novice knappers. The Bridge River assemblage yielded several projectile points with several hallmarks of inexperienced crafters, as well as a larger number of points lacking those hallmarks, suggesting that crafters of multiple skill levels knapped together. The assemblage was then put into a larger context by comparing it to ethnographic depictions of the St'at'imc, who built the village and lived there until its abandonment in the fur trade era, and by looking at the broader literature of craft learning. From these lines of evidence, a theory of social cultural transmission is being built, one which suggests an informal, perhaps observation-based method of learning to knap, rather than a structured apprenticeship or classroom system.
The Bridge River project as a whole has focused on large-scale issues of temporal cultural change and population shifts. By focusing on individual instances of cultural transmission, this analysis brings a different angle to the project as a whole. Although this is not the first analysis of this type done, the study of craft learning through artifact analysis is still relatively small, and this study is the first of its kind on the Bridge River assemblage. Furthermore, this study draws from ideas of locating the individual within the archaeological record and of considering the intangible qualities of culture when analyzing archaeological sites and data. The past was lived just as holistically as the present, and this project is part of an emerging push to use the past's recoverable data to hypothesize about its intangible – and therefore unrecoverable – components.
Mentor Name
Anna Prentiss
Learning from Stone: Using Lithic Artifacts to Explore the Transmission of Culture at Bridge River, British Columbia
UC 332
Inherent in all tool-making traditions is the necessity of passing along required knowledge, both technological and cultural. This is an uncontroversial statement, but a difficult premise to study archaeologically due to the intangibility of the transmission process. Lithic, or stone, tools provide a useful angle from which to approach cultural transmission, as they leave distinct archaeological traces and require specific cultural knowledge to produce. The Bridge River site, a mostly pre-contact pithouse village in British Columbia, has yielded a collection of stone projectile points, which range from expertly crafted to crude and unfinished. Using these projectile points, this project seeks to piece together the process by which novice toolmakers were taught to knap.
Using the existing literature surrounding the process of learning to knap, a series of diagnostic qualities of novice lithic artifacts can be drawn up and established. Based on technological traits, these diagnostics can be applied to any lithic assemblage as a starting point for determining the possible presence of novice knappers. The Bridge River assemblage yielded several projectile points with several hallmarks of inexperienced crafters, as well as a larger number of points lacking those hallmarks, suggesting that crafters of multiple skill levels knapped together. The assemblage was then put into a larger context by comparing it to ethnographic depictions of the St'at'imc, who built the village and lived there until its abandonment in the fur trade era, and by looking at the broader literature of craft learning. From these lines of evidence, a theory of social cultural transmission is being built, one which suggests an informal, perhaps observation-based method of learning to knap, rather than a structured apprenticeship or classroom system.
The Bridge River project as a whole has focused on large-scale issues of temporal cultural change and population shifts. By focusing on individual instances of cultural transmission, this analysis brings a different angle to the project as a whole. Although this is not the first analysis of this type done, the study of craft learning through artifact analysis is still relatively small, and this study is the first of its kind on the Bridge River assemblage. Furthermore, this study draws from ideas of locating the individual within the archaeological record and of considering the intangible qualities of culture when analyzing archaeological sites and data. The past was lived just as holistically as the present, and this project is part of an emerging push to use the past's recoverable data to hypothesize about its intangible – and therefore unrecoverable – components.