Archaeology and the Social Study of Technological Innovation

Geselowitz, Michael

doi:10.1177/016224399301800207

Cited by 8 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…When thinking about how new technologies became persistent in a social setting (and as such visible and prevalent in the archaeological record, representing the cumulative causal understanding of a population) and to understand what could have led to their demise, it is useful to focus on socio-technical framework structures (Geselowitz 1993). Such structures interrelate amongst members of social groups and shape their thinking and acting towards a technological development (Bijker 1995).…”

Section: Level 6 Narratingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Four-Field Co-evolutionary Model for Human Cognition: Variation in the Middle Stone Age/Middle Palaeolithic

Lombard

Högberg

2021

J Archaeol Method Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Here we explore variation and similarities in the two best-represented population groups who lived during the Middle Stone Age and Middle Palaeolithic—the Neanderthals and Homo sapiens. Building on approaches such as gene-culture co-evolution, we propose a four-field model to discuss relationships between human cognitive evolution, biology, technology, society, and ecology. We focus on the pre-50-ka phase, because we reason that later admixing between Neanderthals and Homo sapiens in Eurasia may make it difficult to separate them in terms of cognition, or any of the other fields discussed in this paper. Using our model enabled us to highlight similarities in cognition between the two populations in terms of symbolic behaviour and social learning and to identify differences in aspects of technical and social cognition. Dissimilarities in brain-selective gene variants and brain morphology strongly suggest differences in some evolutionary trajectories that would have affected cognition. We therefore suggest that rather than insisting that Neanderthals were cognitively ‘the same’ as Homo sapiens, it may be useful to focus future studies on Neanderthal-specific cognition that may have been well-developed within their specific context at the time.

show abstract

Section: Level 6 Narratingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Four-Field Co-evolutionary Model for Human Cognition: Variation in the Middle Stone Age/Middle Palaeolithic

Lombard

Högberg

2021

J Archaeol Method Theory

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…To develop our thinking on what might be involved in processes that turn 'I can do it' into 'we do it', we here address technological change and persistence by taking archaeological theory into account. The socio-technical framework we draw on was developed within science and technology studies (Pfaffenberger 1992) and brought into archaeology by, for example, Geselowitz (1993). First presented as 'social construction of technological system' (Pinch and Bijker 1984;Bijker et al 1987) and 'sociotechnical systems' (Pfaffenberger 1992), Bijker (1995Bijker ( , 2006a with others (Law 1992;Law and Bijker 1992) developed a 'socio-technical framework' to explain the social shaping of technology and the technical shaping of society (Bijker 1995: 11).…”

Section: Socially Negotiated Ways Of Doing: the Socio-technical Framementioning

confidence: 99%

‘I Can Do It’ Becomes ‘We Do It’: Kimberley (Australia) and Still Bay (South Africa) Points Through a Socio-technical Framework Lens

Högberg

Lombard

2019

J Paleo Arch

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Building on the body of work regarding the concepts of invention and innovation in lithic technology, we further explore the give-and-take relationship between people and their technologies in two different stone point knapping traditions. From the socio-technical framework perspective, which is one amongst many ways to look at technological trends, the acceptance and stabilisation of a tool-making tradition is not only dictated by its technology-specific properties, such as its ingenuity or usefulness. Instead, it also depends on the social conventions and practices of its spatiotemporal context, which can be explored through the notions of introduction, closure, stabilisation, destabilisation and copying. We explain the theory behind the socio-technical framework with modern examples, such as bicycle use in late nineteenth century England and electrical guitar trends in the last half of the twentieth century. Turning our attention to stone point knapping, we use Australian Kimberley point production during the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries to bridge into how the socio-technical framework reflects in the dynamics that might be involved in lithic traditions. Using this theoretical framework to think about aspects of deep-time point production, such as that recorded from the Still Bay techno-complex during the Middle Stone Age in southern Africa, becomes trickier though. Instead of reliable ethno-historical accounts or dense archaeological context, we have to rely on coarse-grained data sets about distribution, age, environment and population, making inferences more speculative and less testable. In the context of this special volume, we suggest, however, that a socio-technical framework approach may be a useful tool to enhance our thinking about dynamics in ancient techno-behaviours and that more work is necessary to flesh out its potential in this respect.

show abstract

“…2001, 22; Killick 2001, 486). Many examples, including work under the headings of Science, Technology and Society studies (STS; Lemonnier 1992; Geselowitz 1993), ‘Technological Drama’ (Pfaffenberger 1992a,b) and agency (Pickering 1995), share materiality's crucial feature of interweaving the social and material. In research carried out by one of us (Bray 2004), examining the history of thought concerning the adoption of iron technology in Eurasia, it was noticeable that there has been a gradual but sustained shift towards examining material culture as a part of a wider, interconnected social system.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%