Several Fallacies Handicap Thinking Regarding Pleistocene LCTs: For Example, the Victorian Pet Name “Handaxe” Has Biased Minds with Assumed Behavior for 150 Years

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Several persistent fallacies have resulted in truncated and stagnated development of thought regarding lithic large cutting tools. First, the big one: the Victorian era nickname “handaxe” is nearly ubiquitous, hides as a clever and well-known and harmless handle for the whole tool class, but stealthily, and mainly without questioning, presupposes that the devices were hand tools. Second, many researchers who have also stated that there is no clear explanation for these Pleistocene lithic tools also argue the devices were over-engineered. If A is true, we cannot conclude B. Third, there is a regard that the persistence of the device largely unchanged for more than a million years, indicate stagnation of thinking, of development. This fallacy is akin to regarding something common and persistence in our own technology as “going on too long”; such as thinking that the axle has been used for too long. Can’t we come up with another solution? Long-term persistence just indicates that the device remained useful. There are others.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36453.0