| The intent of this dissertation is to rethink what is meant by the term prehistoric technology. Technologies are simultaneously acts of social and material transformation as well as a medium for defining, negotiating, and expressing gendered status and prestige. This dissertation articulates a conceptual framework and analytic methodology appropriate for understanding the social agency of prehistoric gendered relations of production by means of the empirical study of artifacts; in particular, Late Magdalenian bone and antler material culture from the French Midi-Pyrenees, circa. 15,000-11,000 years BP.;The concept of chai ne operatoire is re-evaluated and expanded, based on the idea that bodily gestures associated with technical acts were "performed" in context-specific situations where individual actions were given meaning by the agents themselves as well as by others with whom they interacted. While the methodology of the chai ne operatoire establishes links between prehistoric technical gestures as a form of silent discourse and the physical life-histories of artifacts, it is practice theory, with explicit attention to gender relations, that provides the necessary link to the sociality of technical acts.;This framework of social, material, symbolic, and political processes is applied to an empirical problem in prehistory. Analytic methods employed in this study include: (1) the study of composite artifactual assemblages; (2) a multiscalar research design; (3) use of several cross-cutting analytic axes; and (4) the juxtaposition of site-specific and regional patterning. This study identifies heterogeneous technical patterns on a site-by-site basis. Patterns related to production activities and their intensity are found to be highly site-specific, and one redundant pattern occurs repeatedly: no two sites are alike.;Site-specific flexibility in the enactment of organic technical strategies is interpreted as the embodiment of a general flexibility in social conduct. Social flexibility could help explain why technical strategies were practiced so variously around the region. Social flexibility also may explain why these strategies varied more at some sites than at others, depending on the intensity of production activities taking place and how dynamically-charged they were as contexts in which gendered individuals participated. |
