Stone is of course uniquely important to the process of understanding prehistoric communities in north-west Europe because of its widespread use and good survival. But we have no idea how stone was understood by the communities themselves, nor how it fitted into culturally framed world views and systems of language and thought. As Tim Ingold has recently emphasised, there has been much interest in the materiality of materials, mainly in terms of trying to understand their impact on human experience and their agency in shaping actions, but very little attention paid to the properties of materials per se (2007).
Redressing that balance of course means looking into the social construction of meaning and the creation of knowledge with reference to physical dimensions of the world, a branch of philosophy grounded in a substantial body of theory dealing with cognition and epistemology. For those who enjoy swimming in the warm seas of phenomenology, Martin Heidegger offers one approach when he discusses stone in an essay on The origin of the work of art first published in 1960. In this he suggests that 'a stone is worldless' but can be brought into being through opening up a world in which it has some place, perhaps as a work to give structure to space, or a piece of equipment (1978, 170-1). What people are doing in this view is identifying what Heidegger refers to as the 'thinglyness of things', recognisable, he suggests, in terms of three qualities: matter, form, and interpretation (1978, 160). But the tide is already waning for such thinking. For Putnam at least, Heidegger is a cultural relativist pursuing a 'far more dangerous cultural tendency than materialism' (2000, 317). Contemporary epistemology emphasises instead the role of perception, memory, consciousness, reason, and testimony in building knowledge about the external world and giving meaning, value, and justification to materials, things, and ideas (Audi 2003). Grossly simplified, it is possible to recognise two ways in which things gain social meaning: imposed structures of meaning, and intrinsic perceivable qualities.
© Internet Archaeology/Author(s) URL: http://intarch.ac.uk/journal/issue26/6/2.html
Last updated: Wed May 27 2009