Anthropologist Kathryn Weedman Arthur has spent more than 20 years of her academic life studying the Gamo, a group of people in southern Ethiopia. At the heart of her research are Gamo families who make their living as leatherworkers. In six chapters and an introduction The lives of stone tools presents the results of that research. It is a solid, multifaceted narration of raw material extraction, tool making and use, further providing detailed descriptions of the society, its individuals, their living conditions and worldview. Arthur explains how the lives of stone tools develop hand in hand with those of the leatherworkers. In so doing, she introduces the reader to a world fundamentally different to that most of us are familiar with. It is a fascinating read.
The Gamo view their technologies as reproductive practices. Everything is framed by Etta Woga, “an African philosophy” (p. 6) that encompasses most, or all, of life. The essence of this cosmology is that all that can be observed and experienced in the world is interconnected, gendered and gains meaning and status through individual life cycles. Arthur explains in detail how this is envisaged: stones suitable for tool production begin their life cycle as rain penetrates the ground and reaches the female womb. Stone is born and life arises without human intervention. Those with the right knowledge (the stone-knapping leatherworking families) normally have their own quarry; here they extract knappable stone to make cores, from which preforms for scrapers are manufactured. When the stone is transformed from something birthed by the earth into raw material for tool production, its relationship with people also changes. The stone becomes part of the life of the individual, beginning a lifelong intertwined relationship between scraper and leatherworker.
Stones used for the manufacture of hidescrapers are considered ‘male’ and associated with reproduction. In this context, reproduction is understood in the sense of maintaining the cosmology within which life and the earth exist. The stone chosen from the quarry undergoes a ‘circumcision ritual’ by first being transformed into a core used for producing preforms for scrapers and then by the shaping of the preform into a scraper. This is done by removing something (flakes) from the old, to create something new. When the scraper is complete it rests in privacy, just as a newly circumcised young man needs to rest, before gradually being initiated in craft techniques and practices.
The next stage in the life cycle is a pairing—the male scraper meets a female companion. This is represented by the hafting of the scraper into a wooden handle. Reflecting human relationships, the stone and the haft are joined together in marriage. The completed leatherworking tool—the stone scraper in its handle—is then used to prepare various forms of hides. By interacting with the hides in daily work, the male scraper matures. He transforms from a recently circumcised youngster to a married young man, gradually becoming a distinguished middle-aged man. Over time the scraper becomes exhausted and he retires as an old man. No longer hafted, he is placed near the hearth where he can rest and be cared for in the way that he deserves after a long productive life. Eventually, the scraper ‘dies’ and is buried in the garden, reconciled with the earth from which he once came.
This and other results presented by Arthur reveal the immense complexity in Gamo-tool relations. Applied to archaeology, this study exemplifies both the potential of, and the limits to, how we can develop in-depth, context-based interpretations of fragmented stone assemblages that have been transformed into museum collections after excavation.
The volume is rich in detail and most aspects cannot be explored in a short review. As an archaeologist interested in aspects of intra- and inter-generational knowledge-transfer systems, I find the sections on apprentices and interaction between learner and master within the family particularly interesting. Here, Arthur shows how processes of teaching and learning by participation and facilitation begin long before intentional instruction and practice through hands-on trial and error. Craftsmen are occasionally accompanied by children who are watching, asking questions and playing while the master is extracting raw materials, knapping, hafting or scraping hide. But, it is only after circumcision that the young boys are initiated in the knowledge of stone knapping, hafting and leatherworking.
Arthur presents her research within a post-colonial theoretical framework. The focus is mainly on the inability of science to move beyond a Eurocentric perspective. It is an important discussion, but the references are somewhat dated. This creates a disparity between the discussion in the volume and current research in the field. A book of such complexity as The lives of stone tools cannot be fully up to date when it is published. It is a shortcoming, however, that the book's theoretical discussion does not reflect the studies of the last decade.
Having said that, I must end with superlatives. It is an amazing book! It is a ‘must read’ for those with specific interest in stone technologies, crafts and craftspersons in the context of interpretive archaeology, as well as for those with a more general interest in ethnoarchaeological investigations of worlds that we do not know very well. I am convinced that Arthur's book will become a standard reference in future ethnoarchaeological studies, and in interpretive analysis of (pre)historical stone tool technologies and their social practices.
