North Wind, South Wind

For lack of living witnesses, the prehistorian has relied principally upon the study of ceramic ware and its decorations to establish the spatial and/or chronological boundaries of the first material cultures of Western European agriculturalists. In this archaeological view of civilization, pottery, like linguistic sequences and phyla in today's societies, is seen as a vocabulary of communication, even though we are all aware that linguistic evidence and the contents of material culture can rarely, if ever, be superimposed. The archaeologist therefore sees pottery shapes and decorations as secondary characteristics that are significant, but devoid of material efficacy (derniers degrés du fait (last levels of the fact), Leroi-Gourhan 1943). ¹ Having defined the symbolic entities – the distributions of spatially and temporally related pottery types – the prehistorian has sought to correlate these with other classes of artefacts, whose meaning, in terms of function or technical system, may be conjectured (e.g. the stone axe, arrows) or which remains to be discovered (e.g. most flint or bone tools). Under the name of culture or civilization, then, various assemblages have been identified, which include technical features (the tools themselves) and sometimes technical processes (the ways tools are used to act on matter), but always privileging the symbolic information provided by the pottery and the decorations (secondary features). In this case, for a given feature, the prehistorian will speak of a good cultural or chronological marker which, in his opinion, enables him to recognize a civilization or a chronological period; likewise, he will speak of a mediocre marker when the feature is more ubiquitous, used with no noticeable variation by a group of different “communities” ² throughout space and time. By ranking the sequences pottery/decorations/ornaments/tools/technical processes, by order of cultural effectiveness, ³ the accent automatically falls on the sphere of signifiers, in symbolic terms, thereby positing the underlying hypothesis that the various prehistoric civilizations expressed their affinities or oppositions by adopting, above all, similar or different secondary characteristics, according to what archaeologists see as a universal need to differentiate themselves from their neighbors. Experience has shown these assemblages of material culture often to be fairly unstable; this has been accounted for by opposing block or monothetic civilizations (Clarke 1968, 1972), whose components covary in the same direction, to polythetic civilizations with key types (artefacts specific to a defined chronological and geographic whole); exclusive types (proof of the originality of certain components within a civilization) and non-essential types, which point to phenomena of continuity and communication with other regions and cultures. It becomes evident, then, that to solve the problem of how to classify artefacts, the prehistorian has invented his own simplified version of ethnological methods (Coudart and Lemonnier 1984), but to compensate for this methodological approximation, he has recently adopted the art of measurement, thereby endowing himself with a remarkable descriptive and statistical arsenal which enables him at present to work on thousands of artefacts and to clearly visualize the mutual relations they entertain over time and space (Voruz 1984).