References

Ceram, C.W. 1967. Gods, Graves and Scholars. Harmondsworth, UK: Pelican.

Leroi-Gourhan, André

(1911–1986)

André Georges Léandre Leroi-Gourhan was born in Paris on 25 August 1911. He acquired his education almost entirely outside any conventional context. Although he did attend the seminars given by the sociologist Marcel Mauss and the sinologist Paul Granet during the 1930s, Leroi-Gourhan remained proudest of the autodidactic and eclectic periods of his life, probably because they allowed him to stay outside an academic system that did not impress him.

After World War I, the Durkheimian school, under Marcel Mauss, opened up to oriental studies, to linguistics, and to a comparative approach. Leroi-Gourhan founded a school of prehistory in its own right, countering the existing culture-historical and typological vision of archaeology with the synthetic, anthropological, and semiological approach of “prehistoric ethnology.”

During the 1930s, Leroi-Gourhan was in charge of reorganizing the Arctic section of the Trocadéro Museum (later the Musée de l’Homme) in Paris, and this daily involvement with artifacts and collections was to have a lasting effect on him. It was during this period that he became conscious that the comparative method could be substituted for the standard approach of the “hard” sciences, i.e., that he would be able to validate his interpretation of archaeology only when it could be based on an abundance of data and a range of varied regularities so that no other interpretation could account for all of them.

Leroi-Gourhan laid the foundations for the ethnology of stone toolmaking techniques, a very original approach that combines a systemic analysis of comparative syntheses with the development of methodological tools to be used for particular case studies. The publication of évolution et techniques (Evolution and Techniques) in 1943 established the specific epistemology for this technological approach and announced the concept of chaîne opératoire (chain of operation). Évolution et techniques is in fact an inventaire raisonné (reasoned inventory) that allows us to appreciate the physical effectiveness and the relative complexity of a tool or a toolmaking technique as well as to identify possible substitutes for it. Moreover, this inventory allows us to discern the principles shared by the techniques used in a community and to understand their ethnicity.

Leroi-Gourhan presented his inventaire raisonné in the form of tree-like diagrams, or dendrograms. Those ubiquitous and recurrent instances of solutions that were physically functional were brought together under the term tendance (“tendency”), and he broke each technical process or artifact down into a group of attributes he included in the category he called faits (“instances of techniques”). Between the two extremes of tendance and faits, the dendrogram represents a hierarchical classification of artifacts and technical processes according to their degrés de fait (“degrees of specificity”). If we move from the trunk (the tendance, or the invariant aspect of technique) toward the branches, the technical characteristics retained in the diagram are further and further apart, i.e., they are increasingly culturally different from one another. But reading it the other way around, we gradually move from the different instances to what these different phenomena have in common.

In proposing the notion of “favorable environment,” Leroi-Gourhan also indicated how the “continuity of the technical environment” plays a role in the adoption or rejection of a borrowed item or an innovation: the intellectual assessment of this novelty should be compatible with the mental representations that the group has of its techniques. The criteria distinguished by Leroi-Gourhan to establish technical classifications were those he thought would be able to elucidate the evolution of human technical behavior, and those that would allow him to understand the logic of transformations that accounted for the existence of forms of techniques judged to be increasingly effective.

He believed that the study of techniques had to be linked to the question of the technicity of living beings, “dealing simultaneously with” organic structures, neuro-motor equipment and manifestations of the mind. This fundamental