Expert: John J. Shea - 3/5/2005

Question
I'm a college freshman writing a paper focusing on the pbs documentary, "The Mind's Big Bang."  I found it fascinating that we can recreate tools which were used hundreds of thousands and millions of years ago.  Is this done mainly by trial and error, or are there specific marks found on tools which can be used to infer how they were made?  How do scientists determine how tools were used, say, as spears rather than knives?  I realize these are general questions, so even a reference to a good resource would be helpful.  Thank you!

Answer
Hi Lucy
What archaeologists know about early tools reflects about 100 years of (1) ethnographic observations of recent humans who make stone tools, (2) experiments by archaeologists, (3) analysis of archaeological specimens.  As you can imagine, this is a subject with an immense literature, but here's a few good introductory guides
Schick, K. D. &  Toth, N. P. (1993). Making Silent Stones Speak: Human Evolution and the Dawn of Technology. New York: Simon and Schuster.  Good, popular-science overview -emphasis on the early African evidence.
Whittaker, J. C. (1994). Flintknapping: Making and Understanding Stone Tools. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. A good textbook on how to make stone tools.
TechnologOdell, G. H. (2004). Lithic Analysis. New York: Kluwer. This is a new one, and an excellent introduction to archaeological lithic analysis, emphasis on New World.
Andrefsky, W. J. (1998). Lithics: Macroscopic Approaches to Analysis. New York: Cambridge University Press.  This one is pretty technical, I use it for my upper-level stone tool analysis course, again, emphasis on New World.
You can read about this stuff until you're cross-eyed, but the best way to understand stone tools, I've found, is to try to make them yourself.  If this interests you, check out the website of the Society for Primitive .y (www.primitive.org), they have lots of information on courses, supplies, meetings of people interested in stone tool technology.
Cheers,
John Shea