Flint Daggers in Europe - A Case of Cultural Hybridization?

Författare

Jan Apel

Summary, in English

The early Holocene and the development of sedentary, agriculturally based life allowed for an unprecedented accumulation of material goods (Bogucki 2011; Scarre 2005:191). This affected the organization and objectives of lithic technologies. In contrast to mobile hunter-gathers, who mainly developed elaborate technologies in response to risk (Collard et al 2013, Torrence 2001) Neolithic societies tended to invest in products that were used to distinguish social ranking, religious or cosmological ideas etc. The production of such “secondary features” (Steward 1955) was the result of an increased dynamic density and division of labour (Durkheim 1893, Apel 2001). This novel technological environment resulted in workshops where production-stages of certain artifacts were carried out by specialists, sometimes on different locations in the landscape. (Pelegrin 2006, Apel 2008). For example, unfinished preforms for large flint tools such as axes and bifaces were distributed within large networks to be finished into ready-made tools far away from the original area of production (Apel 2001; Ihuel 2004). In this paper the circulation of flint and metal daggers in Europe during the third and second millennium BC will be discussed and related to some ideas of the transmission mechanisms of technologies and ideas.

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