Since the publication of Steven L. Kuhn’s The Evolution of Paleolithic Technologies (EPT) in 2020, I have used the book as a source for my own research and for teaching at both undergraduate and graduate levels. I hope that this review can make up with experience what it lacks in timeliness. At a minimum, EPT is valuable for the scope and depth of its literature review, which makes it an excellent teaching and reference source. The main reason I keep coming back to it, however, is the novel theoretical approach that Kuhn develops. As he writes in the introduction, “I am far from alone in realizing that conventional ways of breaking the Paleolithic record into stages or phases has tended to direct our thinking . . . down some dark, narrow, and sometimes unsavory alleys” (p. 3). For this reason, Kuhn “took on the writing of this book as a personal challenge . . . to try to describe the evolution of hominin technologies over 2.6 my [MYA] or so in such a way as to avoid . . . easy categories and familiar stages” (p. 4). This is an ambitious goal, and Kuhn describes EPT as “a learning exercise” that he hopes will be useful “to others wrestling with the same issues.” I have certainly found it to be so.
From the title of the book and the brief passages just quoted, three important points are already clear. First, this is a book about the evolution of technologies, plural, and their complex, “bushy” patterns of appearance, diversification, change, and extinction. It is emphatically not a unilineal account of the evolution of some singular human achievement called “technology.” Indeed, chapter 2 provides a useful critique of such progressivist tropes (which Kuhn loosely classifies as “Spencerian”) in archaeological theory. Examples include our persistent tendency to read the record as a series of transitions and milestones on the path to modernity or to conceptualize ancestors as degraded versions of ourselves (“modelling by subtraction” [p. 22]). I would argue that Kuhn’s methodical development of this multilineal perspective makes EPT especially valuable reading for students.
Second, EPT explicitly aims to describe rather than explain the evolution of technologies. Kuhn discusses overarching causal accounts such as cognitive change or climate from the literature where appropriate but generally finds them to be neither complete nor sufficient on their own. Instead, substantial portions of EPT are devoted to narrative descriptions of what happened, where, and when. The obvious danger in this approach is that it could easily devolve into a theoretically vacuous recitation of prehistory as “just one [darn] thing after another.”
Kuhn threads this needle by developing an alternative to stage-based and monocausal accounts that describes change across six “dimensions” of variation in hominin technologies: (1) parts and wholes (composite tools), (2) raw material economics, (3) information transmission, (4) design, (5) diversity, and (6) complexity. For me, the real contribution of EPT lies in its development of these six concepts, each of which receives a chapter. Kuhn states that these are just six of many possible dimensions, and one could quibble with some of his choices. For example, chapter 3 on composite tools does not seem clearly distinct from the dimensions of economics, design, and complexity treated in other chapters. The absence of a chapter on function is also notable. Kuhn attributes this latter choice to the uneven geographic/temporal availability of evidence, something that one hopes can be addressed in coming years by new methods and renewed effort.
Some of the real highpoints of EPT come from the chapters on information, design, and complexity, which provide important clarification for widely used but seldom elaborated concepts in Paleolithic archaeology. For example, the chapter on design presents a balanced discussion of form, function, materials, constraints, and contingencies “in four dimensions” that should allow archaeologists to be far more precise in their use of this term. In this way, Kuhn’s six dimensions elevate “description” to the level of analysis and offer an alternative framework for talking about technological patterns in prehistory.
Third, this is a book about evolution. Specifically, it is about what Kuhn describes as a “Darwinian” (variation, selection, reproduction) mode of evolutionary thought. This is one area where I would appreciate further elaboration, particularly with respect to the units of evolution. Evolutionary archaeology has often focused on the morphological traits of artifact types, and this artifact-centered approach is implicit in much of Kuhn’s discussion across his six dimensions of variation. However, this is a book about the evolution of technologies, not artifacts. Indeed, the closest Kuhn gets to a generalizable causal account (in chapter 9, “Synthesis”) of technological evolution involves interacting effects of ecology, population size, and social network structure on knowledge transmission, socioeconomics, and the organization of production. This suggests a conception of “technologies” as more than just collections of artifacts and something more like the integrated systems of hardware, people, skills, knowledge, social relations, and institutions envisioned by technological systems theory.
Can such a complex system be a unit of evolutionary change? Although much of the cultural evolutionary theory Kuhn draws on in his book originates from an analogy with population genetics, others have promoted multilevel evolutionary theory as envisioning selection on phenotypes, whole organisms, and even species. Could the complexities of developmentally constructed phenotype evolution or the macroevolutionary processes of species selection be useful models for the evolution of Paleolithic technologies? I would love to hear Kuhn’s thoughts. Perhaps in the next edition . . .
