J Archaeol Method Theory (2008) 15:154166 DOI 10.

1007/s10816-007-9046-0

Skill Matters
Peter Bleed

Published online: 9 February 2008 # Springer Science + Business Media, LLC 2007

Abstract Skill is a challenging topic for archeologists because it requires balancing the biases of cultural relativity with the commonsense understanding that some humans are more able than others. Using the content and results model of technology, this paper identifies skill as a variable of technological knowledge with recognizable material results. Late Paleolithic Japanese blade and microblade assemblages suggest that skill differentials exist on the cognitive, operational, and motor levels. These examples, together with ethnoarcheological consideration of modern potters suggest material reflections of technical skill. These include regularity in performance and product, skilled tools, and obvious signs of practice. Keywords Skill . Blade production . Japan . Paleolithic

Introduction All people make things and use tools, but everyone does not perform technical activities with the same result or equal success. Some people execute tasks better than others and use tools more deftly than their neighbors. Likewise, it is hard to look at a group of artifacts and not see variability that suggests some pieces were made or used with greater competence than others. All of this is intuitively obvious and readily observable. It is information that people manage in everyday affairs. Shoppers easily sort through merchandize for the best items. Builders easily avoid (or hide) poorly formed bricks, boards, and fixtures. And teachers routinely evaluate student work. Judgments like these are such a normal part of life that it is worth asking why a dimension of human diversity as basic as skill has not attracted the interest of
P. Bleed (*) Department of Anthropology and Geography, University of Nebraska, 810 Oldfather Hall, Lincoln, NE 68588-0368, USA e-mail: pbleed@unl.edu

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archeologists. It could be that skill escaped archeological attention because we think skill differences are unimportant. It might also be that archeologists lack the wherewithal to deal with skill. Skill might, in other words, be either uninteresting or beyond the abilities of archeologists or the acuity of their sources. Neither of these arguments should be allowed to stand. If the task of modern archeology is to explain the material diversity of humankind, then archeologists cannot ignore skill differences. And, if we approach our work with the belief that the archeological record records and reflects the entirety of the human condition, we must simply develop means of observing and addressing skill differences in past humans. Understanding humankinds material diversity demands that archeologists find ways of defining technical skill, observing skill diversity, and understanding how skill differences operate. As legitimate as the goal of recognizing and describing technical skill might be, the effectiveness with which tasks are executed deserves to be studied by archeologists not simply because it is there or merely because we can expect to see in the material record of the human past. The position taken in this paper is that the ability to carry out steps and processes with proficiency lies at the base of technological complexity and achievement and much of what passes for intellectual growth (see Harvey 1997; Spier 1975). Simply put, skill matters. This assertion remains little more than a hunch, but to give initial support to the proposition that developing technical skill has broad intellectual impact, I would point to the recent history of Americanist lithic analysis. By the early 1970s, archeologists had developed complicated systems for measuring stone artifacts. Using state of the art data processing tools and real statistical expertise, lithic analysts of that not so distant past created statistical descriptions of stone tools that met refined typological constructs. Some terms survive from that work, but modern lithic specialists use little of that research. Sophisticated processual, functional, and technological analyses have replaced typological descriptions and statistical explorations, and it seems safe to say that archeologists know more about stone tools than they did only a few years ago. Of course, many developments contributed to this progression, but I would cite as the central contributing factor the development of flintknapping skill by a number of people interested in the study of stone artifacts. The point of this example is to show that the development of technical skill within our community provided us with a productive context for learning and thinking about stone tools. Development of technical skill was the central development that led the way to insight and understanding. This paper seeks to open the archeological consideration of technical skill by taking three small steps. First, to position skill within technology, I will try to show that it is a type of technological knowledge. Second, in order to make skill accessible to archeological observation, I will propose some material signatures that can signal the existence of skill. Finally, to show how such reflections can be comparatively used to investigate differences in skill, I will briefly discuss an event tree analysis of a pair of similar microblade assemblages from Japan. Although technologically almost identical, these assemblages exhibit skill differences that seem to make rational, adaptive sense. For that reason, they are useful for opening consideration of how skill operates in the real world of evolving and adapting technical systems.

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What is Skill? In everyday terms, skill refers to the proficiency with which activities are executed. The term brings to mind competence, ability, craft, and facility. Skillfully produced items are, thus, well made, regular and complex. A skilled person works with facility, assuredness, and a high success rate. Moving beyond such common sense characterizations, however, is hard for archeologists because the topic has not been the subject of specific archeological investigation. The strong biases of cultural relativism that have been the central element of Boasian anthropology may have discouraged Americanist archeologists from making judgmental assessments that involve finding some humans more skilled than others. We have been able to measure artifacts and describe their variability in many dimensions, but assigning any of that diversity to the fact that some folks were better than others appears not to have been an obvious or comfortable conclusion (Eerkens and Bettinger 2001; Ingold 2001). Cultural relativity seems not to have been a serious limitation to other social scientists and engineers who have done research on skilled behavior. There appears to be no easily accessible synthesis of this topic, but archeologists might want to delve into this literature and into the methods and ideas that have been developed by this work, just as we have used ideas and methods developed by ecologists, comparative anatomists, and geographers. The barest survey of the issues dealt with by psychologists and industrial engineers suggests that the focus of their research has tended to be on intellectual or performance skills rather than on the material reflections of skill. This may mean that it is especially difficult, arcane, or unrelated to modern world problems. None of that would reduce the archeological significance of technical skill. It simply means that we must address the topic without the guidance or limitations of an established agenda. As a part of how humans deal with the physical world, technical skill must be a variable of technology. A few recent studies (Bleed 1996; Fitzhugh 2001; Schiffer 2001; Schiffer and Skibo 1997; Skibo and Schiffer 2001) have tried to make the operation and determinants of technology an explicit point of archeological discussion. Given that archeologists deal extensively with the products of technology, attempts to present an archeological understanding of technology have proved difficult. We still have few refined ideas about the customs of technology, how they are linked to one another, and what determines their operation. In an attempt to make technology a manageable topic of archeological research, I have proposed a model that described the behavioral content of technology in terms of knowledge, applications, and standards (Bleed 1996). In those terms, skill is a kind of knowledge. It refers to the developed ability to manipulate the vocabulary of techniques, designs, and customary resources that are available in a particular technology. It is a quality that can be developed, something that some people know. Other kinds of technological knowledge involve managing repertoires of designs, as well as information about the location and nature of resources and information of the type Schiffer and Skibo (1997) call techno-science. All of these are variables of knowledge in that they all must be learned. Certainly skill can be described in those terms, but unlike other knowledge variables of technology, skill is continuous rather than simply nominal. Skill is behaviorally

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developed rather than simply learned like a series of facts, a repertoire of techniques, or a list of formulae. Technological lore, traditional designs, patterns of tool use, as well as information of resources can all be acquired through fairly straightforward processes of enculturation. Skill, by contrast, must be acquired in a process that may include learning discrete information, but also involves practical mastery. Skilled activity involves knowing how to do something and doing it with routine, dispatch, and efficiency. As such, skill draws on cognitive and motor activities. It may be taught or coached, but it requires development through practice. The behavioral development of skill means that it may have distinctive archeological visibility. The distinctive way in which skill is acquired increases its archeological visibility. Complex activities, with many steps and distinctive residues, are the most likely context in which skill can be observed, but in the abstract, skill can certainly be developed in even simple, everyday activities. In the time-honored method, archeologists describe particular technologies by cataloging the designs people knew how to use and the resources they knew how draw on. With that information, it has been relatively easy to address the situations within which all of that knowledge was applied. In modern paradigms, the common expectation is that those applications will be appropriate in some evolutionary, cognitive, or structural sense. Approaching skill as a special kind of technical knowledge makes it variable comparable to the rest of technology. It lets us investigate how and why skill varies and raises other questions. Under what condition does skill appear? Is it developed and applied situationally? Is it rational in its occurrence? When does it make sense? If skill is beneficial in some situations, does it carry costs in others? Indeed, are their situations when ineptitude is desirable? And finally, how is skill buffered by culture?

Archaeological Measures of Skill The Americanist archeological paradigm, with its grounding in eco-functionalism, assumes that the entire human condition is accessible to study through the archeological record. The only problem we face is developing means of recognizing material signatures of whatever it is we wish to address. Skill should rather easily brought into archeological focus since it involves closely linked behavioral and materials aspects. These are no more subtle than other topics archeologists study, and the links between the behavior and materials of skilled performance are no more inferential than other topics of archeological investigation. It is easy to identify direct and indirect reflections of skilled performance.

Practice and Exercise As explained, skill is unlike other kinds of technological knowledge in that it involves both cognitive and motor abilities. However private and cerebral cognition may be, motor skill has to involve practiced repetition and learning technical skill has to involve repeated interactions with objects. This repetition can be the result of doing the same chore time and again in the normal course of life. Or it can be gained

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by separate practice aimed at learning how to make and use tools rather than at using those tools. Repetition of the first type might be hard to appreciate archeologically, but we should be able to recognize practice for the sake of skill building. Processes that generated numerous similar objects, especially if they are imperfect or unrefined, that are allowed to enter the archeological record in an unused state can be viewedat least in partas evidence of skill building. Those kinds of activities will generate residues that are distinct from, say, industrial production, which has the goal of simple bulk processing. Refitting studies from sites in Europe (Bodu 1996; Fischer 1989) and Japan (Hokkaido Maizon Bunkazai Sentaa 2007) have revealed many instances of repetitive activities that appear to have resulted only in pieces that were abandoned. As satisfying and fun as flintknapping may be, skill building in this way carries material and opportunity costs. Processes than required and warranted practice might reasonably be the focus of special investigation because they would be evidence of extra cost. They show activities that were worth extra investment. Routines and Regularity In addition to requiring acquisition thru practice, motor skills have other qualities that heighten their archeological visibility. Regularity is probably the most obvious hallmark of well-crafted objects. On an immediate level, technological regularity includes smooth surfaces, even spacing of repeated elements like tools marks, and symmetrical shape. Simply linking any of these qualities to skill is certainly inappropriate since they are hard to measure and likely to be deeply culturally buffered. At the same time, there are technological regularities that can be objectively treated as reflections of skilled performance. First, behavioral routines are the basis of motor skills. Practiced skills involve the body in highly routinized patterns. Such routines can be habitual and can easily be culturally patterned and socially maintained, but they are a necessary context within which motor skill is acquired and sustained. Knowing the exact behaviors, movements, and motor patterns of these routines may be difficult or impossible, but the existence of technical routines can be observed at a higher level. Objects that are clearly manufactured in highly patterned, routine sequences can be taken to be reflections of skilled performance that was patterned at other levels. It may have required careful coaching, but certainly involved repetitive practice. Furthermore, in addition to behavioral routines, there are material regularities associated with skilled performance. Work by industrial psychologists and others has shown that skilled motor and cognitive routines are enhanced with so-called smart or cognitive tools that guide activities, steady the hand, or present needed information. They include devices like grips, handles, gauges, templates, and jigs that free workers from some of the challenges of a task. Making these sorts of tools and learning how to use them carries costs, but, once they are mastered, they allow an artisan to work with more regularity and efficiency and greater proficiency. Finding smart tools can be taken as direct reflection of technical skill, but we must expect that they will be hard to find, if only because they are likely to have been made of biodegradable materials. The use of smart tools may be reasonably inferred in routinely produced materials that exhibit remarkable regularities in shape and size or other dimensions that could have been guided by a specialized tool.

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Socio-technic Wherewithal Technical skill involves more than developed motor abilities and kits that include smart tools. At the least it also requires access to raw materials that can support and absorb refined abilities. A social web that can teach, appreciate, and encourage skilled activities is also probably vital (Bamforth 1991; Costin 1998; Maynard et al. 1999; Childs 1998). Skilled people, in other words, need to have developed social networks that are specifically keyed to technological activities. Pulling these social linkages into focus may be challenging since they will have much in common to other social patterns. Still, exchange networks that move selected raw materials over long distance are more than social institutions. Likewise, elaborately produced and presented goods may well signal significant great social and symbolic institutions, but they rest on technological skill. Social institutions that elaborate or build on material systems as opposed to simple consumables, performances or other non-technical creations can be viewedat least in partsas activities that are linked to technological skills. Production Efficiency and Failure Adversity The essence of technological skilled performance is effective production of successful goods. It is notoriously hard to calculate effectiveness and efficiency since it is hard to identify either currencies or standard. Looked at long after the fact, it is hard to positively determine effectiveness or measure efficiency. Perhaps the only easy measures of technological effectiveness are negative ones, reflections of technological activity in process failure. Objects that have to be discarded before they reached a usable state are the bane of a technologist. Production risks can be accommodated in a number of ways. Designs can be adjusted, materials specially handled, and expectation lowered (Bleed 1986; Bamforth 1986; Bamforth and Bleed 1997). Processes that achieve low failure rates on the basic of technical virtuosity have to be considered evidence of technological skill. This is especially true if the process is complex or demanding. Free hand potting or virtuosic pressure flaking with low failure rates have got to be examples of highly skilled performance. These factorsand perhaps otherscan be used to recognize the existence of skilled production. Systematic archeological study of skill aimed at identifying where and when skilled production occurs will require a means of assessing skill disparities in different archeological assemblages.

Assessing Skill in Archeological Assemblages To illustrate how skill differences might be monitored in the archeological record, this section discusses an event tree analysis of two terminal Pleistocene microblade assemblages from Kakuniyama and Araya, central Honshu, Japan (Fig. 1). These analyses are fully presented and discussed elsewhere (Bleed 1996, 2002). The goal here is to use event trees to expose skill differences in the two assemblages. Event tree analysisor ETAis a technique for laying the steps of a technical activity and for presenting information about the success and failure rates associated with specific steps (Bleed 1991). In addition to describing the production patterns

160 Fig. 1 A sketch map showing the locations of Kakuniyama and Araya.

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that were associated with specific types of tools, and the design strategies and technological organization toolmakers brought to their tasks, event tree models also expose the real behavior of tool makers. Microblade technology was widely distributed across northeast Asia, and many other parts of the world, during the later Pleistocene and early Holocene. Microblade technology has attracted considerable attention for two reasons. First, the technology appears relevant to the initial occupation of the high arctic and the New World (Goebel et al. 2003). Beyond that, wherever they were made, microblades were produced with interestingly complex processes that are well-suited to archeological analysis (Kuhn and Elston 2002). Microblades are the hallmark technology of terminal Japanese Paleolithic cultures. Formal variation in the cores and technological variations in the ways they were formed and blades were detached have been studied by Japanese researchers to expose regional diversity in terminal Paleolithic cultures of Japan (Nakazawa et al. 2005). Organic materials virtually never survive in Japanese archeological sites, so the ways in which microblades were used is uncertain. Based on patterns and objects observed in Siberia, however, it is assumed that they were components of composite projectile points. The fact that they are common in terminal Paleolithic sites, when there were no other common stone projectiles, suggests that they were critical parts of hunting weapons.

Araya Araya was among the very first microblade assemblages recovered in Honshu and securely dated to the terminal Pleistocene (Sutoh 1990; Bleed 1996). It is located in central Niigata and sits on a terrace remnant near the interior edge of the west coastal Plain that overlooks the confluence of two major rivers, the Shinano and Uono, which supported major seasonal fish runs in pre-modern times. Stone raw material is

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not available anywhere near Araya. It had to be brought to the site either in the form of large flakes or palm-sized bifaces that served as cores and light chopping tools. The bifaces were the starting point for production of cores which were used to produce regular microblades. These are interpreted as key components of complex projectile systems. Bone materials. As summarized in Fig. 2, the process of making cores at Araya involved only 6 steps. 1. A bevel blow to the margin of a biface always appears to have started the process even if it appears not to have been directly related to the production of microblades. 2. After one or two such bevels and use of the biface as a chopper, 3. A flat platform was detached from the biface, 4. The resulting blank was shaped. This shaping gave the core blades consistent width. Once it was accomplished, 5. One narrow end was detached with a distinctive large 1st blade that created a surface from which, 6. Microblades were removed. In addition to being basically quite simple, the Araya system for making microblades carried low risks. Only four failed pieces are included in the

Fig. 2 An event tree model of microblade production at Araya.

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assemblage, giving the process a production failure rate just over 10%. With the pending pieces abandoned at the site, the overall failure rate for Araya microblade production is 27%. Since only one of the core-related pieces from Araya is represented by more than one flake, it appears to indicate that much of the work on the individual pieces was done elsewhere. All stages of core manufacture were undertaken at the site, but there are many more 1st, 2nd, and platform spalls than finished cores. This indicates that more cores were started at Araya than were left there. At least, this indicates that cores were used in the context of mobility.

Kakuniyama In typological terms, the microblade assemblage from Kakuniyama is identical to the one from Araya. Behind those similarities, there are minor but readily apparent differences in how the people of the two communities made microblades. Kakuniyama is located in northern Yamagata Prefecture, some 200 km east from Araya (Bleed 1996; Uno and Ueno 1983). Like Araya, it is located above a river confluence that certainly had good fishing potential in pre-modern times. A major difference between Kakuniyama and Araya, however, is in their proximity to raw materials. Cobbles of high quality hard shale available immediately below the site were used for essentially all of the tools worked at the site. The assemblage includes both many hammerstones as well as decortication flakes, angular shatter, and tested cobbles. The basic processes of shaping cores and making microblades at Kakuniyama were like those described for Araya, although, as summarized in Fig. 3, there were three kinds of differences apparent in the technologies of the two sites. First, the process of beveling, re-beveling, and flattening a biface was rather less routine than the lock-step sequence used to reduce biface to core blanks at Araya. Second, after the initial shaping steps, Kakuniyama microblade makers used a variety of core rejunivation techniques to extend the use-lives of their cores. This activity is simply not seen at Araya. Failures in this process accounted for most of the failures observed in the Kakuniyama assemblage. Finally, difference in failure rates is another area of differences between these two sites. The production failure rate (the portion of pieces that failed as they were being worked) at Kakuniyama, 17%, was somewhat higher than that observed at Araya. Adding the pending pieces left at the site, the gross failure rate rises to 34%, again somewhat higher than the rate reconstructed for Araya. As at Araya, residues of the early steps of biface beveling and shaping far out number finished cores.

Discussion - Were the Araya Flintknappers More Skilled Than those at Kakuniyama? These two assemblages provide interesting insights into technical skill because both appear to have been aimed at producing the same small blades and because the processes they used to produce those blades that were almost identical. Before

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Fig. 3 An event tree model of microblade production at Kakuniyama.

dealing with those differences, let me first ask if, using the measures I laid out earlier, microblade manufacturers were genuinely skilled. Certainly, the clear patterns exposed by the event tree models indicate that making microblades followed a highly patterned sequence of steps. Exercises aimed at learning both the routines and the motor patterns of microblade production would be expected in a situation like this. And, indeed, there are several assemblages known from northern Japan wherein entire microblade sequences have been undertaken, sometime several times, without one piece having been removed for use. It is easy to see discoveries like this as the residues of skill building exercises. One of the great disappointments of Japanese stone age research is that the acid volcanic soils of Japanese sites essentially never preserve biodegradables. Wood, fiber, or bone smart tools that might have guided microblade detachment and contributed to the skills of Paleolithic stoneworkers are unknown. In the case of microblade production, however, it seems safe to infer that such tools did exist. The number of pieces that would have been included in a microblade production kit, along with the fact that many of them would have been small and delicate, presents further reason to assume that the kits had to include biodegradable containers.

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Managing necessary raw material, in-process cores, groups of batch-produced blades awaiting use, and the necessary pressure tools and hammers, could not have been carried without bags or containers. Such container would also organize the materials and serve as contexts for carrying out the steps of microblade production. They could easily provide a material guide for the process. The postures and motor habits used to detached microblades are not known. Some researchers assume that blades were detached with a pressure technique. Others believe that they were made with indirect percussion. In either case, a vice or grip to hold the cores would have guided the process, increased the artificer s strength and reach, and enhanced precision. A consistent step in the core shaping process suggests that these skill enhancing small tools were, indeed, a regular part of process. At both Araya and Kakuniyama, after the biface was split, the lateral margins of the blank were trimmed. This trimming is very consistent. It is present on every core on both assemblages. And in all cases, it made the cores narrower. The trimming reflects a cost, since it removed mass that could have yielded microblades. Positively, the trimming may have adjusted the width of the cores and made the sides of the cores more regular. It also set up a series of more or less regular ridges. These positive results may have helped the cores fit into grips or vices. In sum, then, the trimming seems to indicate that cores were carefully adjusted to fit with other tools that would have guided effort, determined postures and routines, and generally provided material contexts for the work of microblade production. As similar as they are, these two ETA reveal slight differences in the production of microblades at these two sites. At Araya, 10% of potential cores failed in production. The comparable number at Kakuniyama was 17%, and fully one-third of the potential cores did not yield microblades. These differences are not easily amenable to statistical analysis since the assemblages are small and there is no easy basis for defining expected failure rates. All that can be said securely is that Kakuniyama knappers had a higher failure rate that those at Araya. Beyond that, Kakuniyama knappers practiced a number of techniques to correct the minor glitches that marked their work. These core rejuvenation techniques were not practiced as Araya. While it is possible that Araya knappers were nave of these techniques, it can positively be said that none of their cores required them. Should we assume that the Araya folk did not know corrective these techniques, or that they managed the work of microblade production so skillfully that they did not need them? Given that Araya was far removed from sources of high quality stone and was a place where having usable hunting weapons was important, this would be a situation were developing means of assuring a supply of microblades was critically necessary. Technical virtuosityeither as a general characteristic of members of the group or as a capacity of select individuals whose products were distributed to others would be a reasonable part of that adjustment.

Conclusions The examples of Kakuniyama and Araya show that, with sensitive analysis, archeologists can observe differences in technical skill. It is also tempting to conclude from the difference between Araya and Kakuniyama that skill is a variable

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that people can acquire and call up when needed. This example appears to show that becoming adept at something is something people can do when and where it is appropriate. The examples of Araya and Kakuniyama further indicate that skill can be called up rationally and developed when it can contribute to success and survival. It appears to occur in ways that can be seen as adaptive and practical. There may be other benefits to skill. It could, for example, be a visible reflection of health, fitness, and social connection. It could offer tactile satisfaction that reinforces other technological activities and processes. Practicing a craft, observing other skilled artisans, paying close attention to the outcomes of work, and doing all of the other activities that lie behind the acquisition of skill may also offer an important context for technological advance. Finally, making or acquiring equipment that supports skill offers another context for thinking about technology and work. Getting good at technological activities enhances technology itself. It helps people to become more discerning, more thoughtful, and aware of the capabilities of technology. In that case, the human adjustment to technology may have itself offered a strong positive selection for skill.
Acknowledgements The editors of this volume and three anonymous reviewers proposed significant improvements for this paper.

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