ABSTRACT

Archaeologists and anthropologists are in an excellent position to study aspects of materiality and its embeddedness in social structures that form ties between people, and between people and materials and objects. Following the French anthropologist Leroi-Gourhan (1943: 9–32, 58ff.; see also Dobres 2000), who developed the concept of the chaîne opératoire to cover all facets of people’s lives (including humans fulfilling their basic needs) and actions, I propose that in all technical processes there was a social side to these, and they were inseparable. When focusing exclusively on craft activities, as is the focus of this volume, the three stages of production, distribution and consumption (but see Schiffer 1972: 158 for his stages: procurement, manufacture, use, maintenance, discard), are possibly the closest related to some of the chaîne opératoire steps of any given craft activity. The difference is that the steps in the chaîne opératoire are not limited to a specific number but need to be seen within their individual context. Moreover, nowhere in the work by Leroi-Gourhan (1943; 1945; 1964; 1965) was there any trace that chaîne opératoire thinking limited itself to having a beginning and an end, as this linear sequence of steps seems to indicate: ‘from the procurement of raw materials, to production, use, re-use and final deposition/discard’ (van der Leeuw 1993: 240).