The Decline and Fall of Flint

The replacement of chipped stone technologies by metallurgy cannot be viewed as a simple linear process, nor as the complementary rise and fall of competing technologies. Both technologies are complex arrays of distinct sub-technologies, each of which has its own developmental trajectory. The “replacement” of chipped stone tools by metal equivalents occurred episodically, and perceptions of the process as linear are more the result of our own foreknowledge of the importance of metallurgy to later societies than of their own absolute importance to earlier ones. The replacement process should not be seen as one based merely on the greater utility of metal tools tempered by the time it took to develop requisite technologies. As in most histories of technology, other social and economic factors played primary roles.