Seitenhistorie

Delage, C. (2017) ‘Once upon a time...the (hi)story of the concept of the chaîne opératoire in French prehistory’, World Archaeology, 49(2), pp. 158–173. doi: 10.1080/00438243.2017.1300104.

ABSTRACT The concept of the chaîne opératoire was popularized in the English-speaking world for the first time in the Archaeological Review from Cambridge in 1990. At that time, the history of the integration of this concept into French prehistory had begun. It would take a few years for this process to be successfully completed and more years for the history of research in lithic technology to take this into account. However, the concept and its history have, since the 1990s, been the subject of particularly intriguing writing and rewriting issues. This article presents the state of knowledge on this matter 1) by exposing what could be called the ‘official’ version of this history and 2) by correcting it with concrete historiographical facts gathered in the literature. In doing so, it also speculates on the context and motivations of scholars involved in these projects of writing the concept of the chaîne opératoire.

Dobres, M.-A., & Hoffman, C. R. (1994). Social Agency and the Dynamics of Prehistoric Technology. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, 1(3), 211–258. http://www.jstor.org/stable/20177312

Technology is not only the material means of making artifacts, but a dynamic cultural phenomenon embedded in social action, worldviews, and social reproduction. This paper explores the theoretical foundations for an anthropology of technology that is compatible with this definition. Because of its focus on social agency, practice theory provides an appropriate starting point for a social theory of technology. In addition, three other themes require explicit attention: scale, context, and the materiality of technology. Four case studies demonstrate how archaeologists are beginning to take technology beyond its material dimensions, and additional questions are proposed stemming from the theoretical issues raised in the paper. The purpose of this essay is to synthesize a diverse set of emerging ideas and approaches to understand better dynamic community-level social processes of prehistoric material culture production.

Baker. (1986). Leroi-Gourhan, André: Hand und Wort (Book Review) [Review of Leroi-Gourhan, André: Hand und Wort (Book Review)]. Zeitschrift fuer Ethnologie, 111(2), 290–. Springer-Verlag, etc.

Feyles, M. M. (2022). Two Problems of the Biological Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy & Technology, 35(2) http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s13347-022-00518-2

Ingold, T. (2021) ‘Posthuman Prehistory’, Nature & Culture, 16(1), pp. 83–103. doi: 10.3167/nc.2020.160106.

ABSTRACT: This article asks what part prehistory could play in establishing a posthumanist settlement, alternative to the humanism of the Enlightenment. We begin by showing how Enlightenment thinking split the concept of the human in two, into species and condition, establishing a point of origin where the history of civilization rises from its baseline in evolution. Drawing on the thinking of the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Llull, we present an alternative vision of human becoming according to which life carries on through a process of continuous birth, wherein even death and burial hold the promise of renewal. In prehistory, this vision is exemplified in the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, in his exploration of the relation between voice and hand, and of graphism as a precursor to writing. We conclude that the idea of graphism holds the key to a prehistory that not so much precedes as subtends the historic.

Johnson, C. (2020). Leroi-Gourhan and the Field of Ethnology. Paragraph, 43(1), 10–44. https://doi.org/10.3366/para.2020.0318

ABSTRACT: The work of French ethnologist and prehistorian André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86) represents an important episode in twentieth-century intellectual history. This essay follows the development of Leroi-Gourhan's relationship to the discipline of ethnology from his early work on Arctic Circle cultures to his post-war texts on the place of ethnology in the human sciences. It shows how in the pre-war period there is already a conscious attempt to articulate a more comprehensive form of ethnology including the facts of natural environment and material culture. The essay also indicates the biographical importance of Leroi-Gourhan's mission to Japan as a decisive and formative experience of ethnographic fieldwork, combining the learning of a language with extended immersion in a distinctive material and mental culture. Finally, it explores how in the post-war period Leroi-Gourhan's more explicit meta-commentaries on the scope of ethnology argue for an extension of the discipline's more traditional domains of study to include the relatively neglected areas of language, technology and aesthetics.

IngoldJohnson, TC. (2021) ‘Posthuman Prehistory’, Nature & Culture, 16(1), pp. 83–103. doi: 10.3167/nc.2020.160106.

ABSTRACT: This article asks what part prehistory could play in establishing a posthumanist settlement, alternative to the humanism of the Enlightenment. We begin by showing how Enlightenment thinking split the concept of the human in two, into species and condition, establishing a point of origin where the history of civilization rises from its baseline in evolution. Drawing on the thinking of the thirteenth-century mystic, Ramon Llull, we present an alternative vision of human becoming according to which life carries on through a process of continuous birth, wherein even death and burial hold the promise of renewal. In prehistory, this vision is exemplified in the work of André Leroi-Gourhan, in his exploration of the relation between voice and hand, and of graphism as a precursor to writing. We conclude that the idea of graphism holds the key to a prehistory that not so much precedes as subtends the historic.

2022). 2. The Prehistory of Technology: On the Contribution of Leroi-Gourhan. In Stiegler and Technics (pp. 34-52). Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. https://doi.org/10.1515/9780748677030-005

Bernard Stiegler’s Technics and Time can in many respects be seen as a thematic continuation of the philosophical programme initi-ated some three decades earlier in Derrida’s Of Grammatology(1967).1 Put simply, where the governing theme of Grammatologywas the question of the ‘repression’ of writing in Western meta-physics, Stiegler’s text reformulates this question in terms of the repression of technology, undertaking a series of symptomatic readings of the history of that repression. A second, and impor-tant, point of intellectual continuity between the two texts is their reference to the work of the prehistorian and anthropo-logist André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–86). Like Derrida, Stiegler sees Leroi-Gourhan’s palaeoanthropology as providing an essential starting point for a non-metaphysical reflection on the nature of the human.

Lenay, C. (2018). Leroi-Gourhan: Technical Trends and Human Cognition. In: Loeve, S., Guchet, X., Bensaude Vincent, B. (eds) French Philosophy of Technology. Philosophy of Engineering and Technology, vol 29. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-89518-5_13

Abstract: The work of Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986) has had a strong impact on twentieth century French thought. To account for the origin of our human capacities of memory, anticipation and language, Leroi-Gourhan builds on a “Technology” understood as the study of the functional linkage between the organisms and their environment. In continuity with the biological world, without sudden event (by miracle or by chance), it is to explain the gradual separation of social memory by the interplay of technical innovations that will allow free thinking detached from the immediate situation. The fulcrum of this liberation is the tool: both a biological fact and a movable organ, it permits the passage from the biological world to the human world.

Roman D. (2020) Leroi-Gourhan, André. In: Smith C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Global Archaeology. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-30018-0_715

André Leroi-Gourhan was one of the greatest prehistorians of the twentieth century. He is well known for his significant contributions to archaeological method and theory and to the study of rock art. 

Soulier, P. (2018). André Leroi-Gourhan (1911-1986) : Une vie (Passé recomposé (Paris, France)). View filenameIngold2021--Posthuman_Prehistory.pdfheight250