Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Expedient Technological Behavior: Global Perspectives and Future Directions" at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Stone tools and technological behavior can be considered to lie along a continuum from curation to expediency. While the topic of tool curation has received substantial attention since introduced by Binford, the significance and interpretive potential of expedient technologies—often alternatively described as low-cost, informal, simple, or opportunistic technologies—have enjoyed less explicit discussion. Even so, expediency can be said to characterize an important portion—indeed, perhaps even most—of hominin technological behavior since the Oldowan. Expediency here refers to employing low-cost solutions to technological problems and it may characterize any stage of tool-related behaviors, from raw material procurement to tool manufacture, use, and discard. This session aims to bring together perspectives on expedient lithic technological behavior from a variety of chronological and geographic contexts to reach broader reflections on the theoretical and practical place of expediency in the archaeological interpretation of stone tool technological variability. Within this framework, certain underlying questions are proposed: How is expediency best defined? What sorts of questions can the study of technological expediency answer? What analytical tools should be used to study expedient technology? Does expediency largely “look the same” across contexts, or does expediency have different, culturally grounded manifestations?