Week 7 – Ceramic chaîne opératoire and cultural transmission in European Bronze Age: tracing flexibility and rigidity in techniques and methods with a cladistics analysis to illustrate the slippery stability.

This early draft was authored by Sébastien Manem.

Techniques, methods, chaînes opératoires and technical traditions

In 1940, Vladimir J. Fewkes published an article dedicated to North American ceramic technology. The word technique was only used in the acknowledgements section. By contrast, the term method was present eleven times, and often used in an expression, such as “pottery-making methods”. Ceramics were classified according to two “possibilities”: modeling, i.e. “direct shaping from a lump of paste”, and segmental building, i.e. “one or more tectonic components” such as coiling (Fewkes 1940, p. 172). His work illustrates well, and even more today, that the word technique contains a substantial amount of information that must be classified in order to evaluate the links between social groups and ceramic assemblages.  

Discussing the notions of flexibility and rigidity in the use and transmission of techniques requires to go back first and succinctly to this word technique and what it implies in a field concerned here, prehistoric ceramic technology, and then how to perceive these two notions in cultural transmission. The interest is not to review the notion of technique, but simply to illustrate the chosen way to approach ceramic assemblages. As Cresswell points out (1996, p. 58), a technique is a process and this process is structured. Briefly (see details in Roux 2019), technique may be defined as “physical modalities used to transform the raw material” (Roux 2019, p. 42). Here the notion of physical modalities is fundamental to identify flexible or rigid behaviors. These physical modalities can be observed by five parameters such as the source of energy (muscular energy or muscular energy combined with rotary kinetic energy), the elementary volume on which the forces act (a lump of clay or assembled elements), the forces (pressure or percussion), the type of pressure (discontinuous or continuous) and the hydric state of the clay paste (wet state or leather-hard state). Beyond these parameters of the technique, it is also necessary to integrate operating procedures (the implementation strategy of the functional operations), the tools (active tools, whether they are pressure tools or percussion tools, but also passive tools and rotary instruments), and gestures.

The second fundamental concept that should be combined with the word technique is the method (Roux 2019, p. 41), that can be defined as “an ordered sequence of functional operations carried out by a set of elementary gestures for which different techniques can be used”. A sequence comprises phases and stages, themselves expressing respectively the fashioning of the different parts of the recipient (base, body, neck), and the two successive stages – roughing out and preforming – intended to progressively obtain the desired form. A roughout is a hollow volume that does not present the final geometric characteristics of the recipient. A preform is a hollow volume with the final geometric characteristics of the recipient without undergoing the finishing operations, the surface treatment operations and the firing, ones to be perceived also as techniques and methods.

Techniques, operating procedures, tools, gestures and method described above constitute therefore the fashioning chaîne opératoire, itself part of a larger chaîne opératoire defined as “a series of operations that transform raw material into finished product, whether it is a consumer object or a tool” (Cresswell 1976). In a diachronic approach, the chaîne opératoire traduce way of doing things inherited from one generation to another, thus ensuring the transmission and accumulation of knowledge. As a result, it has become a technical tradition which is the expression of a social group. The changes affecting technical traditions are the expression of the history of societies (Roux 2019, p. 6).

To summarize and remaining within a hypothetical framework, observing whether the transmission of coiling technique involves flexible or rigid behavior within a studied culture does not bring the same view if one considers this technique according to the evolution of the whole chaîne opératoire. The transmission of a roughing out technique (e.g. coiling) can be perceived as stable, but flexible in the method, in the sense that the technique is transmitted to the next generation but with a different method: for the potter’s generation A, coiling concerns the base, while for generation B, it only concerns the body. It will then be necessary to understand whether such a modification in the chaîne opératoire is cultural and/or functional (e.g. related to a new ceramic shape).

The reasoning here was based in some way on an evolutionary independence of each step in the chaîne opératoire. However, it is also valid in a more federative aspect, in the sense that each technique is linked to the five parameters mentioned above, thus revealing kinds of “families” and “sub-families” of techniques (Roux 2019: fig. 2.42). Using the example of roughing out techniques sorted by parameters (Roux 2019: fig. 2.42), molding and hammering appear as resulting from the same sub-family of techniques, based on percussion, that can be grouped, to a broader degree, with pressure techniques (modeling by pinching and modeling by drawing) within the sub-family of techniques on a clay mass (in opposition with techniques on assembled elements), itself resulting from the family of techniques related to muscular energy without rotary kinetic energy.

From this classification of techniques by parameters, the questions that naturally arise in transmission processes are 1) to understand whether there are bridges that facilitate flexibility between techniques from the same family of parameters, 2) if one of these parameters is a signal of transmission that is much stronger and more rigid than the technique itself, and 3) contextualize these notions of flexibility and rigidity in the processes of transmission of a technique or a parameter previously mentioned in the general evolutionary profile of the culture studied, i.e. whether it is in a blending or branching process. This last point is important because if a technical behavior is perceived as rigid in a cultural context dominated by blending process [1], this rigid character will not take at all the same interpretation as if the context is based on a branching process [2].    

Tracing flexibility and rigidity in techniques and methods with a cladistics analysis: a brief theoretical aspect with ceramic technology

If the word technique is the visible part of the iceberg in the field of ceramic technology, that immediately leads to the methodological question of how to understand flexibility and rigidity in archaeology by tracing each of these numerous components described above in a process of transmission over centuries or millennia. It quickly appears difficult to put in interaction all these criteria, especially if the archaeological cultural context studied presents a strong synchronic and diachronic technical variability during centuries. Modeling allows to integrate thousands of data and thus to follow in the global and the detail the evolution of the ways of doing things during centuries.

Darwinian archaeology (Shennan 2008) appears to be a solution for tracing generation after generation flexibility and rigidity in techniques and methods. Flexibility and rigidity in transmission processes may induce a mix between continuity and innovation in the chaînes opératoires that can be translate by the notion of descent with modification in a Darwinian perspective. It respects the notion of technical tradition, in the sense that the whole chaîne opératoire is not modified. Technical traditions and the notion of descent with modification can share the same three rules: “(1) the existence of variation in the entities involved, (2) the presence of a mechanism by which at least some of that variation is heritable, and (3) the differential inheritance of particular patterns of variation across time and/or space” (Lycett 2015). Thus, the chaîne opératoire approach appear to be relevant to be fully integrated to cultural evolution (Manem 2020), “the theory that cultural change in humans and other species can be described as a Darwinian evolutionary process, and consequently that many of the concepts, tools and methods used by biologists to study biological evolution can be equally profitably applied to study cultural change” (Mesoudi 2016).

Cladistics is one of the main approach in biological evolution to model the hypotheses of ancestor-descendant relationships (Darlu et al. 2019; Wiley and Lieberman 2011) and in evolutionary archaeology (M. J. O’Brien et al. 2001; M. J. O’Brien and Lyman 2003). Cladistics generates phylogenetic trees that reflect the relatedness hypothesis. Trees show change within lineages. Cladistics is based on distinguishing between kinds of phenotypic similarities and exploiting of only one of them, considered to be informative to build phylogenetic relationships, the shared derived traits between two or more taxa [3] (here a chaîne opératoire) that are inherited from the taxa’s most recent common ancestor. Shared derived traits constitute the units of evolutionary transformation which indicate historical relatedness. The construction of phylogenetic relationships is based on a simple basic principle: 1) the emergence of a new taxon results from the bifurcation of a pre-existing taxon as the outcome of descent with modification; 2) two taxa are considered to be more closely related to one another than either is to a third taxon if they share a common ancestor that is not also shared by the third taxon; 3) the shard derived traits represent the evidence for exclusive common ancestry between two taxa to the exclusion of a third taxon if these shared derived traits are not also shared by this third taxon; 4) finally, shared derived traits make it possible to define the hypothesis for monophyletic groups, “a taxon comprised of two or more species that includes the ancestral species and all and only the descendants of that ancestral species” (Wiley and Lieberman 2011, p. 9).

European Bronze Age ceramic chaînes opératoires as case study

Sixty ceramic chaînes opératoires (based on roughing out, preforming, finishing and surface treatment operations) from fourteen sites and three cultural contexts in France and United Kingdom dated to Middle Bronze Age (1600-1350 BC) were the basis of a phylogenetic analysis (Manem 2020). One of the results of the tree built with more than 15,000 data showed that these three social groups were deeply dominate by a branching process and anchored in the Early Bronze Age, thus showing kinship links between learning networks not previously suspected in this vast region of Western Europe.

This first result resolved an issue raised in previous work (e.g. Manem 2008, 2017) where it had been observed that several technical behaviors were similar in the south-west of France and around the English Channel (Normandy and south-west England) without understanding whether the origin of this similarity was related to a convergence, a blending or a branching process, or even a mixture of all that. Such an evolution, linked to a branching process, balanced a perception of these European Bronze Age cultures, reputed to be above all in strong economic interaction and stylistic borrowings: contemporary cultures certainly interact, through dedicated networks, but as soon as they transmit their identity and traditions, the transmission becomes mostly vertical, as soon as the signal of transmission is based on the acquisition of motor habits and this takes place between an apprentice and a tutor.

On a broader scale, this phylogenetic tree supports the main tendency observed by Collard et al. (2006) in the world where the branching processes have been more important in cultural evolution than blending processes. However, our result was an atypical case compared to other studies compiled (Collard et al. 2006) and more recent (non-exhaustive list in Manem 2020) and not based on the chaîne opératoire concept. The branching rates (here based on the Retention Index which allows comparison between trees without the same quantity of data) of our tree are exceptionally high, close to the highest rates recorded in biology and compiled by Collard and colleagues. A recent study (Pardo-Gordó et al. 2019) based on decorative techniques on Neolithic ceramics also shows a much lower rate compared to that on ceramic shaping techniques. This important difference between our matrix and matrices built on data not based on the chaîne opératoire concept and the acquisition of motor habits supports that technical traditions, mainly roughing out and preforming, are a particularly strong signal of transmission for branching process.

These two results allow the following discussion about rigidity and flexibility to be channeled into a studied context where transmission takes place in the social group and not catalyzed by exotic borrowing, and where the ceramic chaîne opératoire concept shows a very pertinent signal of transmission in the field of evolutionary archaeology.

Transmissions showing flexibility, rigidity and slippery stability in techniques and methods

This European Bronze Age context offers a wide variability of techniques (roughing out, preforming, finishing and surface treatment). We will focus our discussion on two roughing out techniques (coiling and molding) and some associated parameters and methods whose lineage is traceable in the tree.

Coiling technique is a main technique present in almost all chaînes opératoires (57 of 60) (FIGURE 1: case 1). The phylogenetic tree confirms a rigid transmission anchored in Early Bronze Age: there was no transmission failure, it was never “reinvented”. This roughing out technique crosses the centuries imperturbably, regardless of the explosion of the variability of ways of doing things during the Middle Bronze Age.

In a cladistics approach, coiling is perceived as a shared ancestral character and from the outgroup, e.g. the Early Bronze Age chaîne opératoire (here taxon 10) which allows to polarize the direction of evolution. Coiling is not “informative” in a cladistic view. It’s a phenotypic similarity between two or more taxa that are inherited from a more distant and older common ancestor. Cladistics is only built with shared derived traits, that can be translated into an invention transformed into an innovation (see a reminder of these notions in Roux 2020), thus transmitted at least to the next generation, and finally become itself a shared ancestral character. Unlike coiling, molding appears as an innovation during the Middle Bronze Age and it concerns several chaînes opératoires (7 to 60) which constitute a monophyletic group on the tree (FIGURE 2: A). According to the stratigraphic context, molding is transmitted for several generations of potters, inducing “pottery stability in terms of the stability of traditional patterns of demand” (Nicklin 1971, p. 18). The new fashioning involves molding and coiling. Both techniques reveal transmitted rigid behaviors in the potter’s lineages, even if the appearance of coiling precedes molding and is a technique that is transmitted over a longer period of time that molding. However, a main difference allows here to show the multiple face of this notion of rigidity. Molding technique innovation seems to be also the result of a flexible behavior by providing a solution related to a functional issue. In other words, this technique appears with two new ceramic shapes (FIGURE 2: A), responding to new functional demands. One could even suggest that the rigidity of the original tradition by coiling, faced with a new functional demand, forced flexibility. This new tradition involving molding and coiling revealing a dynamic cultural accumulation fueled by new functional needs in a social group whose transmission is based on a deep branching process. 

If these results allow us to see that flexibility and rigidity are intertwined and respond to different sources (one the original technical tradition and the other a new functional need), it is important to understand how, and no longer why, rigidity engenders flexibility and new rigidity to form a kind of symbiosis. Exploring this issue with the phylogenetic tree requires taking into account parameters, methods and chaînes opératoires defined above.

Tracing the evolution of the parameter dedicated to the elementary volume on which the forces act is to show the architecture of the bridge that leads from the coiling to the molding. The figure (FIGURE 2: B) illustrating the character 268 dedicated to the lump of clay shows that it supports a fundamental clade in the evolution of the majority of chaînes opératoires: from this innovation, a high variability of chaînes opératoires appears (44 to 60) at various times, characterized by modeling, molding, clay mass prepared for flattened disc of clay (FIGURE 2: B). The perception of roughout changes from this innovation, in the sense that the potters no longer conceive their way of doing things as only a “linear” possibility, e.g. the same nature of this technical parameter (assembled elements) for the different parts of the recipient (base, body and neck) and the number of techniques as well as (a single technique vs two or more techniques). This swing and flexibility between “family” of roughing out techniques related to assembled elements to another “family” related to the lump of clay opens up to the diversity of chaînes opératoires. It allows here to continue to work with pressure techniques but, as a novelty, to integrate percussion techniques for roughout, as molding. Therefore, when looking at the whole evolution of traditions during the Bronze Age, the parameters dedicated to the elementary volume on which the forces act (assembled elements and lump of clay) are much more rigid than the roughing out techniques themselves.  One of the possible reasons is that the clades supporting the characters of the concerned parameters express robust systems (Roux 2010, p. 228), i.e. large transmission networks inducing a large number of potters sharing the same parameter thus contributing to increase its stability.

In a more in-depth reading of the chaînes opératoires evolution, this main rigidity of this parameter is in fact the framework of a flexibility and thus an innovation in the methods. Since Early Bronze Age and for many generations of Middle Bronze Age potters, the bases are shaped by assembled elements with coiling (FIGURE 1: case 2), as well as the body and the neck (16 chaînes opératoires to 60). With the innovation concerning the parameter dedicated to the elementary volume on which the forces act, here the lump of clay, the method involving base by coiling disappears for these learning networks adopting lump of clay parameter. The coiling technique and some methods involving coiling continue to be transmitted but for the shaping of the other parts of the ceramics. Rigidity is here and transmitted from one generation to another. Returning to our two new shapes, molding is involved only in the pots’ base (FIGURE 2, A: character 142) and in the base and body for the cups (FIGURE 2, A: character 141). Therefore, coiling is involved for body and neck with pots and only for the neck with cups (FIGURE 2: A). Pots and cups share the same roughing out techniques but not the same methods. Molding has not only been a technique expressing flexibility in responding to the demand for new shapes, but this flexibility has also played out in the methods of dissociating these two shapes. In a sense, the pots are closer from an evolutionary point of view to the previous traditions since two out of three parts are made by coiling. The cup, on the other hand, shows a greater evolutionary distance since molding is used to shape the base and the body. The cup’s neck is the only fossil witness of this tradition derived from Early Bronze Age and transmitted generation by generation as a rigid or conservative behavior generated by motor habits (Minar and Crown 2001; Roux 2019). These two examples illustrate well that the potter juggles between tradition and novelty and that he absorbs and solves it according to a pre-existing mental pattern linked to his own initial learning. The stratigraphic study did not allow to know if the pot appears before the cup, but it would be logical, from an evolutionary point of view.

Techniques and methods catalyze innovation and, in this case, contribute to the branching process. But innovations in methods appear much more dynamic. They cement the link between rigid and flexible behavior, between tradition and innovation, as a slippery stability where a technique literally slides from one part of the ceramic to another. This slippery stability can be observed as the communicating vessels principle: the more the new technique “advances” in partonomy, the more the traditional technique “retreats”. We see it here with some roughing out techniques, but the observation is similar for the preforming techniques (i.e. beating) and methods that are shown in this phylogenetic tree.

Back to the order of development of techniques

We have seen why and how, we still need to understand the whom (Laland 2004). False paradox, this one will immediately bring us back to the why and the how in order to bring things full circle. One last point remains to be discussed on the specific presence of this molding technique and somehow induce all the complexity of understanding an innovation. If this technique is perfectly adapted to produce an open shape with a very curved and regular profile (FIGURE 2.A), other solutions exist. This is the case with a spiral coiling on mold as observed in Uganda (O’Brien and Hastings 1933). This solution would even be the most logical since the tradition was already coiling for the whole partonomy. The flexibility here would have been linked to a passive tool, the use of an inverted pottery as a mold. In addition to what has been said above, it should not be forgotten that the cup is a very open ceramic, the inner surface being particularly exposed to view, and very well finished. The molding technique is perfectly adapted because it results from an action on a mass of clay, contrary to the coiling which would then show joints, even if these can be erased or blurred by subsequent operations, but consuming more time. However, there is also another hypothesis which can be added to it and it will be our witness to try to figure out the whom: the parameter of the force in percussion. It is both present in some chaînes opératoires whose roughing out is entirely by coiling and some chaînes opératoires whose base is a mass of clay and the body and neck is made of coils. The major difference here is that the percussion is only for preforming (beating). This case reminds a field experimentation in Senegal with potters switching from a tradition based on modeling by drawing and involving hammering for preforming to another based on molding. In both traditions, percussion gestures are shared. There is no motor constraint in switching from one tradition to the next (Gelbert 2002, pp. 275–276). A conceivable hypothesis for the Bronze Age would thus be that potters practicing beating also realize the cups by molding. This would explain the ways in which many original behaviors are maintained in pots and cups (i.e., coiling for body and/or neck) and would reveal the flexibility of the force parameter in percussion. Beyond the evolutionary trajectory, there would be an optimization of practices, in the sense that the percussion on assembled elements (and some tools?) would be “recycled” in another family of techniques, those on clay mass (molding). However, tree shows that these two traditions (coiling/beating vs molding) are not in the same monophyletic group and this beating trait appears as a homoplasy in the tree (FIGURE 2, B: character 2): beating is a similarity that is not inherited from a common ancestor only shared by the chaînes opératoires concerned. Consequently, another hypothesis can be envisaged: a potter or a group of potters mastering the beating was able to transmit – horizontal transmission between two vertical learning network – the percussion to certain potters coming from other learning paths based on mass of clay and assembled element traditions within this culture. A charismatic expert is able to force evolution in one direction to solve problems (Roux 2020, p. 216), his own or those of other potters, beyond traditions. The charismatic profile of a potter would be thus determining since it defines the when the evolution takes place, as can be seen elsewhere, as much in nature as in humans (Horner et al. 2010; Laland 2004). In this hypothesis, it will contribute to a process of cultural selection and percussion parameter for molding tradition would result as a ‘bias’ process (Boyd and Richerson 1985; Henrich and McElreath 2003; Shennan 2011).

By taking a particular case of chaînes opératoires involving molding but only studied with cladistics in the whole technical behaviors’ evolution of some Bronze Age societies, we can see how these intervene to determine a part of the direction of the evolution of techniques. Only in part because the solution adopted – molding – was not the unique possibility conceivable, as previously mentioned. The direction of the evolution of technical behavior also seems to respond to an internal mechanics, by branching process and evolutionary stages that do not only concern these morphological types of ceramics and their chaînes opératoires, starting with the innovation of mass of clay for the base, perfectly illustrated by the vast monophyletic group dedicated which involves the majority of chaînes opératoires.

These evolutionary steps lead, here, to a saving of energy and time. Unlike the coiling technique, molding allows to achieve at the same time roughout and preform for base and body, while avoiding traces of joint. In other words, it would be in line with a general trend observed elsewhere: Cresswell (1996, p. 21) indicates, while recalling Leroi-Gourhan (1971, p. 27), that techniques naturally tend to develop, without the need to invoke a social motivation. The techniques are linear, they require a certain order of development, and here it can be summed up in three evolutionary stages, from a coiling tradition: 1) mass of clay, 2) molding for base, 3) molding for base and body. We thus find the principle of order of development (e.g., Cresswell 1996; Simondon 1958) where one evolves by stages of successive operations towards an interdependence that no longer makes it possible to distinguish the operations: roughing out and preforming, and base and body. We find this same principle in an even more pronounced dimension with the wheel throwing, from coiling and then passing by wheel coiling (Roux 2010; Roux and Courty 1998).

In our Western Bronze Age case, the order of development of the molding could appear complex, or rather Cladistics allows to detail the process. The integration of percussion could also benefit from another evolutionary trajectory (i.e. another monophyletic group in this tree, not involving molding) leading to a more complex chaîne opératoire (example: roughing out base, body and neck by coiling and preforming body by beating), itself being the evolution of a less complex (i.e without beating) and similar to the Early Bronze Age tradition. Percussion-related behaviors could thus appear to be particularly flexible, moving between transmission networks that do not share a direct common ancestor. In summary, the percussion parameter could be the spark that produces the flame: the whole evolutionary context was present, all that was needed was a catalyst to tip over.

The complex process based on several potential factors and presented above with molding technique innovation well illustrates the “shifting balance” (Birmingham 1975, p. 371) or even the “technical strategy” (Gosselain and Livingstone Smith 2005, p. 44) when the producer is consciously and unconsciously surrounded between potters’ traditions, internal evolution, order of development, social group and consumer demand. The ancestor-descendant relationship study thus allows “identifying a transmission history and characterizing the forces affecting it” (Shennan 2011, p. 1072).

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[1] “relationships among human populations [can be perceived as] a braided stream, with different channels flowing into one another, then splitting again” (Collard et al. 2006: 171). 

[2] “cultural similarities and differences among human populations are primarily the result of a combination of within-group information transmission and population fissioning” (Collard et al. 2006: 170).

[3] A taxon is group of organisms or a specie. It is shown in a matrix as a list of characters and character states. Characters are observed traits.