Lithic Tools

Title

Lithic Tools

Subject

Stone tools are among the most important evidence of early changes humans made to the earth system. Early humans (8000 BC – 1000 BC) used stone tools, like this mortar and scraper, to process food, hides, and other materials. These tools embody the “Neolithic Revolution,” which was the global shift in human culture from hunting and gathering to farming. Farming required humans to become more sedentary. This led to longer and more sustained interactions with the environment. The environmental (and social) impacts of this were profound. Early humans used tools like these to process and use natural resources in new ways. Their perception of the environment transitioned to one of consumption and extraction. This is due to larger settlements and more intensive interactions with the environment. Instead of living with the environment, they lived on it.

Description

Agriculture is a fundamental aspect of modern society. 90 million acres are dedicated to corn alone, the most productive mono crop (calories/acre), which accounts for one of the largest uses of land in the United States. (Capehart, 2017) No matter if you are the farmer in the tractor plowing the fields, or the consumer buying produce in the grocery store, agriculture pervades your life. Modern agriculture provides the caloric needs in order for humans to undergo their lives unburdened by these basic primal needs. Thousands of years ago, agriculture did not exist and providing suitable food resource for these basic needs was a fight for survival. Stone tools aided humans in obtaining these crucial resources. Stone tools are a technology that has changed human’s relationship with the environment. (Figure 1) They allow humans to manipulate and process resources that would otherwise be less useful. The Durham Museum’s lithic tools are a window into transition from the hunter-gatherer lifestyle to the more sedentary lifestyle of a farmer. The use of these tools aided in the reshaping of human lives and their environments. Relating these tools to the anthropocene provides some contextual evidence as to how these tools, and more importantly, the role that agriculture played in the transition to a new epoch. Sustained interactions of the earth through agriculture have fundamentally impacted human relationships with the environment, which poses anthropogenic impacts through developing technology, changes in societal and cultural structure and subsequent ties to Omaha.

The context of these particular stone tools has been lost in time. This is unfortunately the case with many similar artifacts in museums around the world. Once removed from the ground, archaeological evidence loses its context, and by consequence much of its history. The possibilities are practically endless for the history of these stone tools. The only provenance known regarding these tools is The Durham Museum acquired them from the Joslyn Museum in 1965. Even without this context what we can understand is the purpose and story surrounding these stone tools, which in turn, links us, and links Omaha, to profound change in the earth system.

The availability of ground stone and the ease of manipulation of these rocks into tools make ground stone tool some of the most ubiquitous artifacts in human history. Almost every civilization or group of humans used ground stone tools at one point in time. Although sources of ground stone were static, early humans were nomadic and would often disperse these tools across the landscape. For example, the Western Comanche tribe traded extensively with the French in the 1700’s. Native American trade centers were the norm during these times and were critical in the exchange of technology. (Hämäläinen, 1998) These more modern trading systems are indicative of the trade systems of the past. In context of chipped stone tools, rigorous analysis of particular stone a tool is made of, one can predict the site in which it came from. One can then track the dispersion of stone tools across landscapes from the Folsom, Davis, Cody, and Clovis sites. (Irwin and Wromington, 1970) Paleo-Indians created these tools anywhere where ground stone is/was abundant. If these tools were discovered in the Midwest, the approximate source of stone used to construct these tool would have been the Rocky Mountains. Similar tools have been unearthed by archaeologists and their classification offer insights into their use and environmental implications.

The tool which resembles a bowl is called a mortar, which would have been used to process and store plants and other food materials by crushing them with another rock called a pestle. (Figure 2) People also used these tools to process and store paints and dyes. The other tool could have been used as a scraper in which the edge would have been used to soften hides or to clean meat off of animal hides while seemingly primitive, these basic tools remain in widespread use today. The modern mortar and pestle, for instance, is often used in the kitchen to process certain food items. The first lesson these tools offer is that the history of technology (which cannot be divorced from narratives of the Anthropocene) is as much the history of modification as it is radical innovation.

Stone tools transcend the divide between ancient humans nomadic subsistence strategies and later agricultural sedentism. Paleo-Indians brought stone tools with them when they settled North America. “To colonize the Americas, modern humans had to learn to subsist in the extreme environments of the Siberian Arctic.” (Goebel, Waters, and O'Rourke, 2008) These modern humans were the first to colonize the Americas by crossing the ice bridge of Beringia approximately 15,000 years ago. According to Barton et al, these Paleo-Indians were characterized as mobile hunter-gatherers that used high-quality stones, like chert and obsidian, which were highly curated and had multiple functions. (Barton, 2004) The main purpose of these tools was to aid in the hunting and processing of animals, such as the woolly mammoth, giant ground sloth, or the mastodon, in order to obtain better utility of these resources.

Paleo-Indian cultures, for instance, are even named after the locations where these stone tools were first discovered, the most famous being Clovis and Folsom. Although the popular Clovis and Folsom assemblages are not notable in the Nebraskan soil layers, two nearby dig sites have led to evidence of Paleo-Indian activities. According to Holen and May, the La Sena and Shaffert mammoth sites, both located in Frontier County, Nebraska, have fossil evidence of mammoth bones that were processed by humans by breaking them open in order to obtain the bone marrow of the mammoth. (Holen and May, 2002) The descendants of the early Paleo-Indians, Native Americans, continued to use this stone tool technology to obtain and process food for thousands of years to come. In fact, the keystone species of the Great Plains, the bison, is attributed as a key to survival of the Paleo-Indians of the plains as early as 11,000 years ago, and often associated to the mainstay of the more modern Native Americans in Nebraska and the Great Plains. (Hofman and Graham, 1998) “The Lakota and Cheyenne, for instance, are described as relying heavily on bison meat for food and living a nomadic lifestyle in tune with the movements of the Bison. More sedentary farming societies, such as the Mandan, Hidatsa, Pawnee, Oto, and Kansa, incorporated seasonal long-distance bison hunts into their annual subsistence." (Ritterbusch, 2002) Stone tools were crucial in aiding early Native Americans in utilizing large mammals, such as the bison, as a vital resource. They used the stone technology, like the scrapper, to make the resources already available to them, more fruitful. Respectively, lithic tools are an important piece of technology used by the Paleo-Indians and later used by more local Native American tribes in the Great Plains that was key to the survival of these peoples.

Hunter-gatherer cultures used lithic technology to hunt more efficiently and process the animals they were using as a food source. However, not all lithic technology was used in the hunting and processing of animals, and in fact, lithic technology is often associated with sedentism and the rise of agriculture. Early humans were nomadic due to the nature of their food source. They would follow their food in the form of herds of mastodons, woolly mammoths, and even bison across the land. The stone tools they used were often cumbersome and difficult to travel with. In order to move more effectively with their food, they would leave the stone tools at their campsite with the assumption they would create new tools wherever they would live next, or come back to them when the herd moves back to the original campsites. This is why there are large deposits of stone tools left in the earth and not an even distribution of them. (Price and Bar-Yosef, 2011) It was not until domestication of crops, the Neolithic Revolution 10,000 BC, which more sedentary lifestyles became common. Agriculture, incentivized communities to settle in order to tend their fields, this allowed people to keep their stone tools and use them for a longer time and create larger stone tools once too cumbersome and hard to transport. These stone tools aided in the cultivation of crops and processing of the subsequent products, such as the mortar.

According to Weisdorf, “The rise of Neolithic agriculture is unquestionably one of the most important events in human cultural history." (Weisdrof, 2005) It is often assumed that farming was much easier and the preferred method of obtaining food for the early humans. In reality, it was labor-intensive and backbreaking work for the same amount of calories compared to hunting. Historical ecologist Jack R. Harlan poses the question the best: “Why farm?”8 There are many proposed answers for this question. Economic historians North and Thomas believe it is as simple as a comparative static model that explicitly considers the influence of property rights and population growth upon a man’s behavior. Smith argues it was a decision born of necessity due to the large-scale extinction of certain mega fauna species approximately 10,000 years ago (itself possible the result of excessive hunting). (Smith, 1975) Many more theories try to illustrate the exact causation of the transition to agriculture. (Weisdrof, 2003; Trigger, 1989; North and Thomas, 1977) Whatever the motivations for its development, agriculture has become a defining component of our society today through the feature of innate sedentism and excess of calories that it provides.

Farming has been the most direct and uninterrupted interaction between human beings and their environment. The innate goal of farming is to divert and alter natural resources in order to fulfill human goals of creating a sustainable food source. “Farming is a way of obtaining food that involves the cultivation of plants and the controlled herding of animals." (Harlan, 1992) The new systems of obtaining food were much more than cultivation, herding, or the ensuing domestication of various species. The differences in lifestyles, hunter-gatherer vs. farming, necessitated changes to societal structures. The fundamental difference between the hunter-gatherer and the farmer is the way in which calories are obtained. The hunter-gatherer must be nomadic, whereas the farmer remains sedentary. Cultural and societal structures reflect the differences in these lifestyles. Agriculturalists intensively modified the land around them in order to create a milieu that suits their needs. The basic goal of a farmer is to alter the plant community in order to favor the preference of a few plant species that produce food. This produced, in the best of circumstances, fantastic amounts of energy in the form of food, but it likewise necessitated new relationships with their surroundings, transforming the environment.

In the face of these developments and resulting population increases of sedentary societies, nomadic lifestyles slowly waned and a rise of sedentary lifestyle ushered in a new culture. Hunting and gathering has been the way to make a living for hundreds of thousands of years. It was not until recently, geologically speaking, agriculture has taken its roots, and an exponential amount of changes have accompanied it. The sheer amount of changes the past thousands of years necessitates the idea there is a fundamental difference in these two points in time, and this idea is prevalent in early Anthropocene hypothesis thinkers. Early anthropogenic traits have been observed with the presence of cultivated plant remains in archaeological collection sites, in which researchers first noted these changes in radiocarbon-dated soil deposits. Interglacial core samples provide evidence of the rising atmospheric carbon dioxide and methane levels as anomalous in comparison to previous trends. During the Industrial Revolution, 150 years ago, a large spike in these levels is observable. Recent collection of interglacial core samples provide insight that the start of the rising spike in greenhouse gases spanning from 7000-2000 years ago. Rise in carbon dioxide and methane levels display trends that had risen one standard deviation point above previously recorded levels in interglacial core samples. This upward trend strongly suggest that the rising greenhouse gas levels were not naturally, but in fact were the result of developed agricultural fields and livestock accumulation which poses anthropogenic traits. (Ruddiman, 2013) Certini and Scalenghe argue the start of the Anthropocene is, “...the period when human activity acts as a major driving factor in modifying the landscape and the environment." (Certini and Scalenghe, 2011) It is undeniable the Industrial Revolution is a possible golden spike for this new geological epoch, however, there was a large change in the earth system preceding this revolution and therefore the golden spike should be placed prior. (Figure 3)

The development and advancement of agriculture promoted the manipulation of the environment and a shift in human diets. That transition is reflected in our stone tools, whether represented by the stone scraper and its connections to the exploitation of mega fauna, or our mortar and pestle, crushing cultivated grains. As human lives became more complex, the impact on the Earth grew even further. The study of environmental history furthers uncovers the impact of agriculture in relation to the anthropocene. “Environmental history examines the evolving relationship between people and nature - it is rooted in place. From this perspective humans exist within nature, not apart from it, and like all animal species, our survival depends upon the health of the habitat in which we live. We both shape and are shaped by the world around us." (Dant, 2016) This has rapidly changed as societies formed and evolved. Similar tools are transformative as their complexity was shaped to suit human needs. The complexity of technology and the shifting of lifestyles exhibit anthropogenic traits as the composition of the earth as the evolving human cultures become more complex and the manipulation of the earth intensifies.

Creator

Adam Luton
Will Norskov

Source

Capehart, Thomas. “Background”. United States Department of Agriculture Economic Research Service. https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/crops/corn/background.aspx (accessed December 12, 2017)

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Irwin, Henry T., and H. Marie Wormington. "Paleo-Indian tool types in the Great Plains." American Antiquity 35, no. 1 (1970): 24-34.
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Barton, C. Michael, ed. The settlement of the American continents: a multidisciplinary approach to human biogeography. University of Arizona Press, 2004.

Holen, Steven R., and David W. May. "The La Sena and Shaffert Mammoth Sites." In Medicine Creek: Seventy years of archaeological investigations, pp. 20-36. University of Alabama Press Tuscaloosa, 2002.

Hofman, Jack L., and Russell W. Graham. "The Paleo-indian cultures of the Great Plains." Archaeology on the Great Plains(1998): 87-139.

Ritterbush, Lauren W. "Drawn by the Bison: Late Prehistoric Native Migration into the Central Plains."

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Smith, Vernon L. "The primitive hunter culture, Pleistocene extinction, and the rise of agriculture."Journal of Political Economy 83, no. 4 (1975): 727-755.

Weisdorf, Jacob L. Stone age economics: The origins of agriculture and the emergence of non-food specialists. No. 03-34. 2003.

Trigger, Bruce G. A history of archaeological thought. Cambridge University Press, 1989.

North, Douglass C., and Robert Paul Thomas. "The first economic revolution." The Economic History Review 30, no. 2 (1977): 229-241.

Harlan, Jack Rodney. Crops and man. No. Ed. 2. American Society of Agronomy, 1992.

Ruddiman, William F. “The Anthropocene.” The Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Science 45, (2013): 45-68.

Certini, Giacomo, and Riccardo Scalenghe. "Anthropogenic soils are the golden spikes for the Anthropocene." The Holocene 21, no. 8 (2011): 1269-1274.

Dant, Sara. Losing Eden: An Environmental History of the American West. John Wiley & Sons, 2016.

Citation

Adam Luton Will Norskov, “Lithic Tools,” Omaha in the Anthropocene, accessed March 29, 2024, https://steppingintothemap.com/anthropocene/items/show/14.

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