The Lives of Stone Tools ― Crafting the Status, Skill, and Identity of Flintknappers

The Lives of Stone Tools gives voice to the Indigenous Gamo lithic practitioners of southern Ethiopia. For the Gamo, their stone tools are alive, and their work in flintknapping is interwoven with status, skill, and the life histories of their stone tools.

Anthropologist Kathryn Weedman Arthur offers insights from her more than twenty years working with the Gamo. She deftly addresses historical and present-day experiences and practices, privileging the Gamo’s perspectives. Providing a rich, detailed look into the world of lithic technology, Arthur urges us to follow her into a world that recognizes Indigenous theories of material culture as valid alternatives to academic theories. In so doing, she overturns the long-held Western perspectives concerning gender, skill, and lifeless status of nonorganic matter.

The book offers the perspective that, contrary to long-held Western views, stone tools are living beings with a life course, that lithic technology is a reproductive process that should ideally include both male and female participation. Status as a skilled knapper is acquired through incremental guided instruction parallel with one’s own maturation in life. Only individuals of particular lineages knowledgeable in the lives of stones may work with the stone technology whose lives parallel those of their human knappers from birth (procurement), circumcision (knapping), maturation (use), seclusion (storage), and death (discardment).

Given current expectations that the Gamo’s lithic technology may disappear with the next generation, The Lives of Stone Tools is a work of vital importance and possibly one of the last contemporaneous books about a population that engages with the craft daily.

Kathryn Weedman Arthur is an associate professor of anthropology who for the last twenty years has been working with the Gamo in Ethiopia on issues of heritage, craft specialization, and gender. Her work with Gamo communities has been published in leading peer-reviewed journals such as Science, and she has received such prestigious awards as the Gordon R. Willey Prize and the GAD Prize for Exemplary Cross-Field Scholarship.