Technological Orientation
The term "technology" has had a very limited and theoretically uninteresting connotation in American anthropology for decades (cf. Dobres and Hoffman 1994). Materialist frameworks such as those of White (1959) and Steward (1955) left relatively little room for considering tools and techniques as anything more than culturally prescribed means of production. Materialist theory in American anthropology immediately before and after World War II seems to have operated in ignorance of seminal theoretical developments in what became European structuralism (Mauss 1936; Leroi-Gourhan 1943, 1945). My own orientation with respect to technology is descended from that of the late André Leroi-Gourhan, who himself was clearly inspired by Marcel Mauss's Techniques du Corps, and whose major theoretical and methodological works on technology have only begun to be translated into English (Leroi-Gourhan 1993). Critical to Leroi-Gourhan's research design was the notion of the chaine operatoire, which he saw as a conventionalized, learned sequence of technical operations implicated in all cultural production from the manufacture of stone tools to the painting of underground cavities to the modern assembly line. These chains were constituents of culture rather than biproducts.
At the level of individual material production episodes, these châines opératoires are constituted of sequences of applied techniques, which Leroi-Gourhan viewed as the manipulation of conventional tools by means of habitual, learned gestures. Viewed more broadly, châines opératoires can be seen as organized into more encompassing technical systems, driven by a limited number of technical principles. Leroi-Gourhan clearly recognized that these underlying technical systems were/are never the only ones possible and argued that they emerged from profound cultural contexts and historical/evolutionary trajectories.
For him, regional variation in underlying technical systems manifested itself in what archaeologists recognize as style, which he saw as a new and revolutionary kind of material behavior that replaced the need for regional biological diversification in humans. A new generation of scholars of technology and material culture (Lechtman 1971, Lemonnier 1983, Schlanger 1994) have built on the foundation constructed by Leroi-Gourhan (cf. Dobres and Hoffman 1994).
My goal here is to illustrate how detailed observation and experimentation aimed at understanding the châine opératoire underlying the construction of material representations can lead to new insights into the social, economic and ideational contexts of the representations themselves.
