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The Culture of Stone: Sacred and Profane Uses of Stone Among the Dani (review)

Interpretations of prehistoric technologies and material remains, until recently, have been dominated by the concept of culture as environmentally adaptive and determined primarily by subsistence and economy over and above social, ideological, and religious factors. The argument of these earlier “processualist” archaeologists, seeking a strictly scientific archaeology, was that “mind” could not be extracted from the material remains of the archaeological record. In more recent years, what has come to be known as “social archaeology” has focused mainly upon material culture and technology as manifestations of social status, power, and prestige as major stimulants to technological innovation. It is only very recently that some archaeologists and other material culture specialists have recognized the equal importance of belief systems and religious practices and their relationship to material culture and technology. While acknowledging the extreme difficulty of recovering beliefs and practices from the earth, they have argued that living societies sharing a similar economy, technology, and social complexity may shed significant light on the beliefs and practices of the prehistoric society under investigation, a methodology termed ethnoarchaeology. Cambridge archaeologist Ian Hodder’s Symbols in Action: Ethnoarchaeological Studies of Material Culture (1982), a study of pottery use and meaning in an African context, was extremely influential as a first attempt at ethnographic research with primarily archaeological questions in mind. Bud Hampton’s work follows in this tradition of “symbolic” archaeology. The Culture of Stone is focused upon the production, use, and meaning of stone artifacts in the western Highlands of New Guinea among villagers practicing a Stone Age technology—no pottery, no metals, no woven texB O O K R E V I E W S