Technological Organization

In the English-speaking world, technological organization—also referred to as the organization of technology—is the predominant interpretative framework for inferring what the features of stone artifact assemblages can tell us about past human behavior, regardless of their chronological or geographical distribution. Lewis Binford originally conceived of technological organization as “the organizational characteristics within a technology which may be manipulated differently to effect acceptable adaptations for different situations” (see Binford 1979, cited under Technological Organization and Mobility, p. 255). Since then, technological organization has come to be defined more formally as “the study of the selection and integration of strategies for making, using, transporting, and discarding tools and the materials needed for their manufacture and maintenance” (see Nelson 1991, cited under General Overviews, p. 57). Studies of technological organization seek to investigate how stone tool technology can solve adaptive problems. This approach developed from ethnoarchaeological studies of the relationships among artifact assemblages, subsistence activities, and land-use patterns—such as John Yellen’s observations of the !Kung bushmen in the Kalahari Desert (see Yellen’s Archaeological Approaches to the Present: Models for Reconstructing the Past, New York: Academic Press, 1977), and Lewis Binford’s study of the Nunamiut Eskimos in Alaska (see Binford’s Nunamiut Ethnoarchaeology, New York: Academic Press, 1978). The literature on technological organization has identified a number of archaeological “signatures” for organizational differences that reflect different patterns of land use and planning (see Binford and Stone’s “Righteous Rocks” and Richard Gould: Some Observations on Misguided “Debate,” American Antiquity 50.1 (1985): 151–153). While this literature is vast, an overall sense of cohesion is lacking. This article identifies the key literature on the organization of technology, the different problems it can investigate, and how these problems can be approached. It is divided into eight parts: (1) general overviews, (2) fundamental principles of this approach, (3) analytical strategies using time and risk as measures, (4) the relationship between mobility and technology, (5) features of stone artifact assemblages from which information about mobility can be generated, (6) the impact of artifact use-life and the probability of discard on archaeological visibility, (7) examples of technological strategies that have been identified in the archaeological record, and (8) tool design.