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The Tool That Lasted a Million Years
About 1.8 million years ago in Africa, archaic humans generally referred to as of the Homo erectus grade invented a new technology and a novel stone tool, the first such inventions in more than a million years. This tool was roughly pear-shaped in plan, lens- or wedge-shaped in section, and was fashioned by a new method of shaping which removed chips bifacially (from both sides of an acutely angled edge) around part or all of the object’s circumference. It fitted comfortably in the hand, was relatively easy to transport and was suitable for a range of cutting tasks, among other uses. They were the first objects onto which humans had imposed an arbitrary form, and clearly signalled the beginnings of intelligent design. For the next 1.6 million years (and beyond), hominins of several different species on every continent of the Old World made these tools in a wide variety of shapes and sizes and out of any suitable stone; when such stones were unavailable they made them out of bone. From crude beginnings hominins slowly developed the new technology, adopting different types of hammerstone and paying greater attention to symmetry and other visual aspects, often creating objects that amaze us today for their craftsmanship and beauty. After making and using them for well over one and a half million years, humans eventually gave up the practice and the objects were abandoned, buried and forgotten.
About 220 years ago in Western Europe, modern scholars belonging to our own species began to rediscover these curious stone objects when excavating minerals in quarries and caves, where they were often found in association with extinct animals. By May 1859 they had finally recognised and accepted them for what they were, human artefacts of immense antiquity, a realisation that demanded as much of a rethink about ‘man’s place in nature’ (Huxley 1863), as the publication of Charles Darwin’s long-anticipated evolutionary treatise On the Origin of Species six months later. Together these new ideas forged a new understanding of deep human history and spawned both a new discipline and period of evolutionary time – the Palaeolithic or Old Stone Age – a period long enough and long-enough ago for the primitive humans implied in Mr Darwin’s theory to have lived and evolved.
The object of concern in both paragraphs is what has commonly come to be known as the handaxe – amongst many other names – the characteristic tool of the archaeological complex currently known as the Acheulean. It is a most iconic and emotive object, one that sometimes fills the modern beholder with a vivid sense of their ancient ancestors’ feelings by drawing from the same basic emotional and reward systems. No tool has ever been used for so long or by so many generations of humans. This book is a history of both the handaxe makers and the generations of people who have spent their lives trying to make sense of them.
The Tyranny of the Handaxe
Handaxes dominate research into the Palaeolithic period, and always have done. Yet there is no doubting that for a full picture of technology, handaxes should not be considered in isolation but as part of their parent assemblage, and in the broadest possible context. This is the approach taken throughout this book. However, it is equally true, in my opinion, that handaxes are uniquely positioned to reveal factors about past human social life, cognition, ethnicity, learning, subsistence, mobility, emotions and identity than all other classes of ‘palaeolith’ combined, and thus deserve star billing. One must always remember, though, that handaxes and other palaeoliths are merely cyphers for past humans. As this introduction and the subtitle of this book reveal, my driving focus lies with the handaxe (and other palaeoliths), the Acheulean and the wider Earlier Palaeolithic, in that order.
I first studied handaxes as an undergraduate at the London Institute of Archaeology in 1990, where I was drawn to the murkiness of the Lower Palaeolithic and where I spent the summer of 1991 excavating at Boxgrove. It was here that the path of my archaeological career really began, ironically during the one summer when Boxgrove failed to produce an abundance of handaxes, the single specimen of the season being found in Quarry 1 by the supervisor excavating beside me. After spending some time learning lithic analysis at the British Museum, and writing an undergraduate dissertation on core and flake technology, I decided that I wanted to study handaxes for my doctoral research. This I was lucky enough to do at Cambridge under the late Professor Sir Paul Mellars. I quickly realised how ill-prepared I was for such an enormous topic, and that I knew practically nothing about handaxes or the key questions that needed addressing. I decided that the best way to get to grips with the Acheu-lean was by studying the history of the subject, following (unknowingly at the time) A.J.H. Goodwin’s advice that it was the best place for any novice to start. It quickly became apparent that even this was not going to be a straightforward task. Many of the disciplinary histories available to me were either too general, dealing with the whole of prehistory from antiquity to present in ~120 pages, or too specific, several tackling the establishment of human antiquity from 1800–1860, or the historical developments in a particular country or region. Where subject-specific précis were provided, they were so heavily summarised that events and ideas could easily become confused and conflated. Some of the biggest sinners here were mid-century British writers who, in attempting to summarise earlier French ideas, not only lost much in translation but also perpetuated a greatly simplified and somewhat alternate history of the Palaeolithic. Exceptions such as Bruce Trigger’s A History of Archaeological Thought gave a superb grounding in the theoretical and intellectual development of archaeology, but the Palaeolithic was just one period vying for attention among the many paradigms, developments and schisms within the subject.
It became clear that to gain a proper understanding meant doing the research myself on a global scale, but it was equally clear that a fully comprehensive history was simply beyond any one person. This is increasingly the case. The bibliography for this book contains more than 2,250 entries, a fraction of what has been written on handaxes, the Acheulean and the Earlier Palaeolithic. While digital resources have certainly made access to older or more obscure texts much easier, and translation engines rendered all languages almost intelligible, the rampant scale of publication means it is beyond any one person to know everything. This is a particularly acute problem as we move towards the present day. In January 2020, a Google Scholar search for three alternative spellings of Acheulean – Acheuleén – Acheulian produced 1,230 hits for the 1970s, 1,814 for the 1980s, 2,393 for the 1990s, 5,430 for the 2000s and 12,920 for the 2010s. Since the advent of the internet, the trend has become exponential, more than doubling every decade, the past decade alone producing an average of three and a half new articles every day, and that is just one relevant search term.
Towards a Global History of Palaeolithic Thought
The present volume is thus the product of a 30-year career handling, reading and thinking about handaxes. It is based on the original sources in the original languages, as well as contemporary academic syntheses and popular accounts (far more than are included in the bibliography), tracing not only ideas and interpretations about the past but also the discoveries and circumstances that seeded those ideas, and their immediate and long-term effects. It deals primarily with the Lower and initial Middle Palaeolithic, although as a register of significant discoveries and interpretations about the deep past it also provides a comprehensive history of archaeological thought in Pleistocene microcosm. It takes us on a journey through the history of archaeology and related sciences, providing a narrative of discovery, personality and interpretation from the embers of the seventeenth century to the 2020 Covid-19 pandemic. For reasons stated earlier, I make no claims to include everything nor everybody, particularly for recent decades, where conclusions are still to play out or where the significance of some ideas and discoveries might not yet be realised. There are two deliberate omissions. There are few photographs or portraits of the people involved: as much as I desired to include these, the copyright costs for use in this volume just cannot be justified when so many images can be viewed instantly, free and on numerous devices using a simple internet search. There are also no world or regional maps showing the locations of significant sites, as they could not be printed at a useful scale: once again online virtual maps today provide an immediate and accessible alternative.
The book is intended to be read as a narrative whole or dipped into to study specific topics and eras. It is intended for everybody interested in the deep past from the seasoned professor to the relative beginner. If I have learnt anything from its writing, it is that most of the questions to which we currently seek answers were posed in the first few decades, each subsequent generation dusting them off and recycling them according to new discoveries, new techniques and the prevailing spirit of the age. Regrettably, and for reasons that are all too obvious, this has too often involved negative characterisations of earlier work carried out under different theoretical frameworks and from different empirical foundations, seeking to break with the past rather than benefit from the cumulative knowledge gained and a plurality of views. Major paradigms are cast against each other, weaknesses exposed and conclusions rejected rather than assimilated. The longed-for holistic approach is always, therefore, out of reach. We even collude with the media in letting people believe that the textbooks must always be rewritten: they can never, it seems, just be updated and rebound. And all the while many important points, debates and examples lie practically forgotten.
I therefore seek to understand not only the ideas and opinions of previous generations, but why they had those ideas and held those opinions. It looks not to judge but to create a cumulative narrative of archaeological thought and interpretation of the Lower Palaeolithic in general and handaxes in particular, providing the tools for researchers from all walks of life and at all levels to understand the deep past from multiple perspectives. In doing this it also serves as a resource for historical and modern summaries of major sites, sequences and events: a bumper book of bifaces, for the whole archaeological family.