A focus on social context is emphasized in more recent studies of exchange. Building on Hodder's (1982) development of a "contextual approach" to exchange, archaeologists following this approach argue that the study of production sites has been incomplete because the social and sometimes historical elements of quarries and production systems have been neglected in processual tradition that focuses overwhelmingly on the organization of technology and production efficiency. In particular, Hodder and others have argued that the perspectives on exchange articulated by Mauss (1925) and even by Sahlins (1972) have been largely neglected (to judge from citation patterns) in the formal approaches previously described.
A study by Richard Bradley and Mark Edmonds (1993) focuses on axe production and circulation in Neolithic Britain through an examination of quarry production at the Great Langdale complex in the Cumbrian mountains in the Lake District of the English uplands. This area was a source for a fine-grained volcanic tuff material used for producing stone axe heads that were flaked, ground, and often polished, and have been found in Neolithic. Through petrographic analysis it has been possible to connect many axes made from tuff and granite found throughout Britain with the raw material source in the Great Langdale region, but subsourcing resolution has not been possible.
Bradley and Edmonds (1993: 5-17) begin with a useful critique of the formal approaches to exchange first articulated in the work of Renfrew and his colleagues. In reviewing prior approaches, Bradley and Edmonds perceive weaknesses and untenable assumptions in the links asserted by prior researchers connecting (1) efficiency in reduction strategies, organization of production, and degree of hierarchy in social organization (Torrence, Ericson, others), and (2) geographical distributions of types of artifacts with the nature of social organization (Renfrew et al.).
Bradley and Edmonds emerge with a strategy that permits them to connect temporal change in quarrying and the organization of reduction in the immediate vicinity of the source with perceived changes in knapping strategies. They also explicitly attempt to incorporate evidence from social and symbolic constraints on quarries, where historical specifics about specialization, quarry access, and socio-political boundaries appear to trump the larger patterns of circulation documented during the 1970s by Renfrew, Hodder, and others (Bradley and Edmonds 1993: 9, 63). Further, the authors observe that while these social and symbolic control variables are extremely difficult to appraise from archaeological evidence, these unknowns were ultimately some of the most important variables informing Torrence's (1986) formal approach to efficiency and socio-economic control of production. On these grounds, Bradley and Edmonds devote more effort to methodological and theoretical goals that they feel are attainable: documenting variability in production, inferring connections with regional consumption evidence through temporal context, and exploring social and symbolic generalities through ethnographic analogy from quarries and with evidence of regional ground axe distributions in Britain.
Bradley and Edmonds' (1993: 83-104) lithic analysis begins with experimental knapping studies that allow them to identify the character and frequency of different classes of flaked stone generated during production. Establishing reduction stages from flakes of Great Langdale tuff material is particularly difficult because the material does not contain a visible cortex. Bradley and Edmonds pursue strategies that produce a wide range of flake and core morphologies in an effort to capture the range of possible variation in reduction at production sites. Their expressed aims are to move beyond simple measures of efficiency in production, and they also seek to use their experimentally-derived assemblages to inform their analysis such that that they do not merely derive a single, generalized reduction sequence but, instead, shed light on how knappers controlled form, and anticipated and avoided mistakes.
It was just as important to discover which methods couldhave been used to make an artifact as it was to establish which were actually selected. It is clearly important to understand howthe production process was structured in a given context, but we also need to discover whyit took the form it did (Bradley and Edmonds 1993: 88, emphasis in original).
In earlier work Edmonds (1990) cites from, and applied, the chaîne opératoireapproach to his investigation of quarry production. Curiously, in the Bradley and Edmonds (1993) volume the French term does not appear (although they cite the chaîne opératoireliterature), and in their quarry production studies they instead choose terms like "pathways" to describe sequential reduction.
Part of Bradley and Edmonds' aim is to reintegrate symbolic and social perspectives into the study of quarry production and exchange, empirical archaeologists may ask: how do Bradley and Edmonds conduct symbolic and social analysis with lithic attribute data from a quarry workshop? In their data-oriented investigation of reduction strategies, Bradley and Edmonds gather standard lithic attribute data that is largely in common with those that follow the processualist tradition; it is in the interpretations and assumptions about economy that the differences emerge. For example, many of the assemblages are described by Bradley and Edmonds along a production gradient that range from "wasteful and inefficient" to "careful preparation" or ad-hoc versus structured production using evidence from flake dimensions, platform morphology and preparation, flake termination type, and other attributes.
For Bradley and Edmonds, efficiency is investigated primarily in a heuristic manner in association with spatial context in that they suggest expediency, investment, and reduction strategies over the larger quarry area. Their technical analysis is able to conclude, among other things, that axes appeared to be exported from the quarry area in two forms: (1) crude asymmetrical rough-outs with hinges and deep scars, and (2) more processed and nearly finished artifacts that lacked only polishing.
They also note that some processing appeared to occur at some distance from the quarry, and in other cases nearly all of the production sequence occurs at the quarry. The authors used evidence of excessive labor expenditure, such as in axe grinding and polishing, as a contrast to the "rational", cost-minimizing expectations of efficient production expectations. For example, they explain that polishing of axe heads is laborious, but it results in greater longevity in the axe because during use the irregularities can act as platforms for unintentional flake removal. Furthermore, polished axes remain in their hafts more consistently. Polish over the entire surface, however, is not necessary and is labor intensive. Were axes polished over their entire surface to increase their exchange and gift value through greater labor investment? In evolutionary approaches, labor investment in goods is cited as a form of prestige technology (Hayden 1998, see Section 2.2.2). Bradley and Edmonds present an insightful review of existing approaches and bring quarry analysis one step further with their in-depth technical analysis that informs a novel yet cautious interpretation with an incorporation of elements of the symbolic and social theory current in the early 1990s.
The chaîne opératoireanalysis of quarry materials described by Edmonds (1990) deserves further mention. The chaîne opératoireapproach conceives of lithic reduction as a comprehensive system or "syntax of action" from the origin of lithic material at the quarry to reduction, reuse, and abandonment within a larger context of human action. Sellet (1993: 106) writes that the chaîne opératoireis a "chronological segmentation of the actions and mental processes required in the manufacture of an artifact and its maintenance in the technical system of a prehistoric group. The initial stage of the chain is raw material procurement, and the final stage is the discard of the artifact."
In the realm of lithic production, Shott (2003) and others question whether the chaîne opératoireapproach is notably different from Holmes' century-old concept of "reduction sequence" (Holmes 1894) and Schiffer's Behavioral chain analysis (Schiffer 1975). Two major differences distinguish chaîne opératoirefrom the lithic reduction sequence analysis in the North American tradition. First, while the American reduction sequence focuses solely on lithic production, chaîne opératoireapplies to apprenticeship and expertise relating to allmaterial culture behavior beginning with lithic production but also including ceramics, textiles, architecture, wine-making, and others (Tostevin 2006: 3). Second, even when confined to lithic production, the chaîne opératoireapproachexplicitly attempts to infer the choices and intentionality of the knapper, as well as to capture greater context and breadth by seeking to address the larger context of activity and action.
French archaeology has a long tradition of attributing archaeological variability to choice, stretching back from Boeda (1991) to Bordes to Breuil. This tendency is balanced by an equally strong American-based resistance to attribute variation to cultural choice until all other factors, particularly reactions to environmental stimuli, have been excluded, forming one of the central tensions in the current debate (Tryon and Potts 2006).
Others argue that while attempts to consider the intentionality of the knapper are commendable, in their weaker form sequential models like chaîne opératoirerun the danger of being overly typological and rigidly unable toincorporate behavior that diverges from a one particular linear progression (Bleed 2001;Hiscock 2004: 72).
From the perspective of quarry procurement and workshop activities, production would have proceeded with a goal in the mind of the knapper based on the quality of the raw material as well as organizational issues like technological requirements and mode of transport. For Edmonds (1990: 68) implementing a chaîne opératoireapproach at a quarry workshop appears to have been complicated by an overwhelming presence of flaked stone belonging to early stages production, and a paucity of evidence concerning consumption. It seems that observing a complete "syntax of action" is hampered by the incomplete view of reduction, as the evidence is overwhelmingly from workshops and not from consumption sites. Thus, while quarry workshops have relatively few classes of artifacts the techniques, such as refitting, are seldom practicable when there is an abundance of early stage material and an under-representation of advanced reduction flakes and complete, or near complete, tool forms.
Variability in initial reduction of cores observed at the Great Langdale quarry workshops reflect the available raw material and the quarrying methods used to procure the material, and these frame the starting context for following a chaîne opératoireanalytical model. However, the chaînesequence is often truncated and largely capable of merely determining early reduction characteristics that are basic to all reduction sequence analyses in the tradition of Holmes (1894). For example, at Great Langdale the researchers determine, mostly from platform characteristics, that there was expedient, ad hoc production in one period and more precise and controlled flaking in another. Sequence models seem to be of limited utility in contexts where only initial workshop production is available, a condition that perhaps explains the avoidance of an explicitly chaîne opératoireapproach in the later Bradley and Edmonds (1993) volume. In sum, chaîne opératoireis roughly synonymous with American 'reduction sequence' and Schiffer's Behavioral Archaeology in terms of low and mid-level theory, but in high level theory it is not generally presented except for the theory of chaîne opératoireitself (Tostevin 2006). Given the difficulties of meaningfully applying chaîne opératoireto data based almost entirely on quarry workshop contexts, the concepts will not be attempted in this research.
While earlier approaches focused on efficiency and evolutionary schema in a commodified vision of production, Bradley and Edmonds (1993) attempt to take a middle road where they use measures of efficiency and investment observed in workshop contexts in a heuristic manner, but they principally base their interpretations of production on the changing socio-political context of the larger consumption zone. They consider artifacts in terms of dichotomies that probably existed in some form, dividing the circulation of inalienable gifts from alienable commodity production. They seek to consider the implications of gifts in the theoretical terms that relate gift-giving and status acquisition with the political strategizing of elites in Neolithic Britain. Further, they consider the "regimes of value" where gifts and commodities circulate and are assigned value that is a construction of political contexts and not merely a reflection of measurable costs using the concepts of social distance borrowed from Sahlins. Finally, Bradley and Edmonds consider the circulation of axes as wealth goods and the ways in which elites may influence the specialized production of axes (Brumfiel and Earle 1987) and the circulation and consumption in a peer polity situation (Renfrew and Cherry 1986) or through control of deposition (Kristiansen 1984). Ironically, while neoevolutionist approaches are explicitly rejected, one is left with the question: what is theoretically significant about changes observed in the circulation of axes if not the link to evolutionary changes in socio-political organization? In both Edmonds (1990: 66-67) and Bradley and Edmonds (1993), evolutionary explanations are avoided in the analysis of production, but in regional exchange the changes observed attributed to increasing levels of social ranking as indicated by competition over exchange networks and specialized knowledge during the Later Neolithic.