Learning to Knap: Apprenticeship Systems in the Early Woodland

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Tools are frequently conceived of as finished products rather than processes in and of themselves. Studying stone tool production allows for greater insight into pre-historic social systems, particularly that of apprenticeship, due to the development of criteria for detecting skill through lithic analysis. This project looks at Herrick Hollow I, a lithic scatter site in Delaware County, New York, in the context of the Meadowood phase of the Early Woodland period of the Northeast. The project includes observations of formal stone tools and debitage analysis in order to determine the presence of skill differential at the site and the possibility of a community of practice surrounding flintknapping. This is put in the larger context of the political economy of the Meadowood and comparative work on apprenticeship and learning.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25178