Marianne Sommer, "(Net)working a Stone into a Tool. How Technologies of Serial Visualization, Arrangement, and Narration Stabilized Eoliths as Archeological Objects", in: Gisela Eberhardt and Fabian Link (Eds.), Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2015, 15–45

Abstract

This paper deals with issues surrounding so-called eoliths in the nineteenth and early twentieth century: Were these very crudely chipped stones from European Tertiary deposits really human-made? The focus is on the visual, spatial, and narrative arguments used by some of the eoliths-proponents. One powerful strategy consisted in integrating the supposed tools into existing geological, archeological, and paleoanthropological series, relying on established scientific knowledge and the wider cultural significance of the serial. However, the flints first had to be translated in cascades of inscriptions from actual stones in situ into drawings and series of drawings in publications to eventually gain a high level of abstraction as elements in formalized tables of juxtaposed series. My discussion of the eoliths focuses on these aspects in the production of knowledge in transit between communities, spaces, and media.

Published In

Gisela Eberhardt and Fabian Link (Eds.), Historiographical Approaches to Past Archaeological Research, Berlin: Edition Topoi, 2015