A Critique of ‘Fossil Culture’. The Economic Structure as the Analytical Unit of Palaeolithic Cultural Change

Abstract

Nowadays, technological and processual interpretation of the lithic record has been generalized, partly displacing theclassical typological approach. Thereby the lithic variability and technological change have started to be contextualizedin the economical and environmental processes surrounding the lithic tool production. However, typology is still the onlyargument when discussing about cultural evolution, since the traditional sequence divided into “fossil cultures”, eachcharacterized by distinct and recurrent “guide fossil” assemblages, is widely applied. Thus, in this paper we argue thatit is necessary to create a new palaeo-cultural model that more properly suits the Palaeolithic record, getting rid of thesacredness of the object, challenging the direct relationship between morpho-types and cultural traditions and suppressingthe lithic record privilege as the only marker of cultural shift. In conclusion, we propose the economic structure asthe analytical unit to approach the Palaeolithic cultural change.