from each other in terms of the amount of planning involved in their execution.

Curated technologies are those that involve anticipation of future needs, which may include the acquisition, transport, and stockpiling of raw materials and/or finished tools. Time is invested in preparing and transporting raw materials and in making, maintaining, and transporting tools. The reward for this is the immediate availability of usable tools when the need for them arises. Expedient technologies are those in which tools are made and repaired at the place of use. In contrast to curated technologies, expedient technologies involve an expenditure of minimal time and energy on the manufacture, reshaping, and resharpening of tools. Finally, opportunistic technologies are those that involve no forward planning at all. The acquisition of raw materials and the manufacture and maintenance of tools are flexible and reflect immediate responses to unanticipated conditions. Typically, artifacts are manufactured from whatever materials are at hand and are discarded immediately after use.

Attempts have been made to relate these different types of technologies to the forms of particular tools and to the composition of entire artifact assemblages through two interrelated concepts: tool design and site function. Archaeologists whose artifact assemblages contain tools that were used in food procurement (as opposed to those used to make other tools) have expended some effort in trying to develop ways of analyzing tool design. These researchers argue that tools used at the moment that a prey item is captured or harvested are subject to the greatest design constraints. As a consequence, most of the relevant studies have focused on various forms of weapons, such as spear points and other types of projectiles.

A number of researchers have used the concept of risk to analyze patterns of group mobility, insofar as mobility can be reconstructed on the basis of the distribution of artifacts made from raw materials of known origin. It is suggested that highly mobile groups tended to accumulate artifact assemblages containing a wide range of raw materials, collected from various raw material sources visited in the course of other subsistence activities (i.e., the collection of raw materials was an embedded activity). This collecting strategy would have reduced the risk of being without a raw material when it was needed for tool manufacture. Assemblages associated with highly mobile groups also tend to contain only small numbers of artifacts: tools and tool blanks made from large blocks of durable and easily worked materials that could be readily fashioned into functionally specific tools (thus, the risk of being without a particular tool when it was needed was also minimized). Less-mobile groups tended to make more use of local material because distant sources of stone were visited only rarely. These groups also economized on the use of exotic stone by resharpening as much as possible tools made from the less accessible materials.

In sum, functional studies have continued to emphasize investigating the multiple causes that give rise to artifact form. Various approaches to modeling the reasons for variable artifact form and assemblage composition have been undertaken, integrating aspects of technology, tool design, resource acquisition, and mobility. The common theme of these studies is the desire to understand the role stone artifacts played in the evolution and/or behavior of different human groups.

Idealist Approaches to Artifact Analysis

Discussions about the art, religion, and beliefs of ancient peoples have been present throughout the history of the discipline of archaeology, but the development of formal analytical and interpretative frameworks for the study of these phenomena dates only to the early 1980s. Just as there are a variety of ways of investigating the functional (or evolutionary) significance of artifacts, there are also a variety of ways of investigating what artifacts can reveal about the cognitive abilities of our ancestors or about the conceptual frameworks of past human societies. Some researchers have applied concepts and methods developed in linguistics or psychology to the problem of interpreting artifact assemblages in cognitive terms, but the most influential of the current approaches to this problem of gaining insight into the prehistoric mind