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Technological Efficiency and tool curation

Bamforth has acknowledged that tool curation is often defined in relation to its efficiency, but amid the multiple components involved in the activity, what is efficient is rarely specified. As stated in his 1986 publication, Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation, Bamforth seeks to clarify the notion of curation, assess several previous attempts explaining why curation occurs, and to present a hypothesis accounting for several important aspects of curation behavior.
Binford (1973, 1977, 1979) outlined two contrasting aspects of technological organization. According to him, curated tools are effective implements for a variety of tasks in which their structure has been designed with a particular function in mind. These pieces are maintained through numerous tasks, transported, and recycled when exhausted. To the contrary, lithic technologies based on expediency comprise manufactured tools, which are then used and discarded upon task completion. Therefore, curation should produce technologically sophisticated tools with formal distinctions designed to facilitate particular tasks, whereas expedient tools produce technologically simple assemblages portraying less patterned pieces.
Attempts to explain the occurrence of curation in the archaeological record, by both Binford (1973, 1977, 1979) and Torrance (1983), have lacked the specificity necessary to address the full behavioral complexity intrinsic to the process of curation. Binford links curation to subsistence-settlement organization, while Torrence attributes curation to the problem of scheduling different activities co-occurring in time.
Bamforth critiques these two stances with two simple explanations. He first criticizes both Binford’s and Torrence’s inability to address the full suite of behavior intrinsic to curation. Torrence’s definition’s failure to predict curation processes occurring after the initial design is its downfall, whereas Binford’s definition of curation encompasses an additional four aspects of stone tool manufacture. However, Bamforth recognizes that all five kinds of behavior need not occur in concert all the time. His example, that the flaked knives used as butchering tools in communal Plains bison kills were apparently manufactured in advance, resharpened, but then discarded, without being recycled, transported, or applied to other tasks beyond their primary function, indicates that different aspects of “curation” are circumstance dependent and that “no single measure of technological ‘efficiency’ can be universally applied to explain them” (P.39).
Ultimately, technology is structured by the requirements of an activity or set of activities that constrain variation in all aspects of tool manufacture and use (P.39). Technological efficiency appeases these requirements with minimum energy expenditure. Alternatives to extensive curation (i.e.: resharpening a dulled edge vs. discard and creating a new tool) are efficient only in the absence of sufficient raw material. Maintenance and recycling are thus closely related to raw material availability and not directly, as proposed by Binford, to settlement organization or the time limits, as advocated by Torrence, on the activities for which tools are used.
If processes of maintenance and recycling are a function of raw material availability, than a second major criticism is unveiled. Both definitions ignore local patterns of lithic resource availability, which inevitably places fundamental constraints on technology and subsequent curation processes. In light of this, Bamforth states, “we must examine these aspects of lithic resources in conjunction with the ways in which humans are or were organized to satisfy their other needs” (P.40).
Bamforth illustrates this response to material shortage using an example from the American Southern Planes. The Lubbock Lake site has hosted intermittent occupations over the past 12,000 years including significant Folsom, Plainview, and Firstview portions of the Paleoindian period.
The lithic assemblage is composed of three basic types of raw material, ranging from vey high-quality chert, to very low-quality silicified caliche. Bamforth’s hypothesis stipulates that maintenance and recycling rates should vary with access to raw material. Assuming distance to a source effects access, this range of materials should demonstrate varying rates of retouch (curation) depending on the distance between the source and the site. Therefore, tools manufactured from material originating in more distant sources should be subject to more frequent retouch in an effort to prolong its use-life.
In accordance with this hypothesis, tools manufactured from distant sources were subject to a high frequency of curation. In addition, based on their material, tools differed in their designated tasks. Durable but granular quartzites and cherts were predominately selected for wood work, while non-local stone, as expected, was used frequently for all tasks. In short, tools constructed from non-local materials were subject to higher maintenance and recycle rates reflecting their multipurpose nature. Bamforth acknowledges that the Lubbock Lake assemblage depicts a toolkit organization based on the different distributions and natures of the various sources of stone used to manufacture it (P.48).
The Lubbock Lake example affirms Bamforth’s original statement; that tool curation is a complex set of behaviors that cannot be explained by any single factor.

Bamforth, Douglas B.
1986 Technological Efficiency and Tool Curation. American Antiquity 51(1): 38-50.