Creativity and design are often said to go hand in hand. Indeed it has been suggested that design is what links creativity and innovation inasmuch as it shapes ideas to become practical and attractive propositions for users (Cox 2005). Yet design is also frequently seen as an essentially modern notion linked to industrial production (Cardoso 2010). It has influentially been defined as what ‘can be conveyed in words or by drawing’ (Pye 1968: 17): the conceiving of a plan or instruction as the first part of a two-stage process with the intent that the object it describes be made by another person or, more likely, mass-produced by a machine (Risatti 2007). Such an understanding of design stands in opposition to contemporary notions of the craftsman or artisan producing handmade, unique or bespoke products in which value lies in the skill and understanding of materials required to make them (Risatti 2007; Cardoso 2010). It also implies that design did not exist prior to the industrial revolution of the nineteenth century, let alone in prehistory.

It is impossible, however, to imagine a world where objects are not intentionally configured but somehow emerge fully functioning in a serendipitous manner. Everything that is man-made has been designed, whether consciously or not (Cox 2005). Design is an inherent quality of all well-made things rather than a ‘self-conscious characteristic’ (Wildenhain 1957). The design of objects, whether something as everyday as a cooking pot or as complex as a supercomputer, provides a solution to human needs (Norman 2004). From an archaeological point of view, an understanding of objects as having been deliberately configured is fundamental to the investigation of human behaviour in the past.