ABSTRACT
If the logic underlying so-called technical choices were as obvious as people seem to think, ethnologists and historians would not spend so much energy wondering about it. “Technical choice” is in fact the adoption of a technical solution by a human group in order to solve some problem. This takes us back to the conditions that decide when an invention becomes a technical innovation, which in turn are not totally unconnected with those that decide when a scientific discovery becomes of practical socio-economic use. And yet, in most cases, as soon as one or more alternatives appear to exist (at least with hindsight), the choice of any one solution is not all that obvious.
