Integrated methodological Approaches to the Study of Lithic Tools

The behavioural significance of lithic production, even though intensively investigated, is still mostly unsolved, while the vivacious discussion in the scientific community has brought to elaborate diverse methods and to develop many typological schemes. Investigating about the relationship between stone tools production and human behaviour deals with the reconstruction of techniques and functions and aims to reconstruct the economical choices performed by past humans. The overall interface of these main issues would aim, in the very end, to reconstruct veritable economic strategies and social dynamics performed by human groups who interacted with given environmental settings. In this sense stone tools production and their function are probably some of the most fundamental issues which directly deal with the material traces of past human activities, mingling the strict survival commitments related to evaluation of costs and benefits of a series of actions in order to get the goal. By establishing a cause-effect relationship between human labour and matter to be transformed, by means of integrated approaches to the study of lithic assemblages it is possible to model an answer to basic questions for scholars who deals with prehistoric activities: why, how, what is being produced? In the last phase of the investigative process it is worth to ask for the human group and the time in which all the actions had been performed. In this heuristic, cultural labelling came definitely at last.