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Communication and Material Culture: Pleistocene Tools as Action Cues

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2009

A. Martin Byers
A. Martin Byers
Affiliation:
Department of Social and Cultural Sciences, Vanier College, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H4L 3X9 & Anthropology Department, McGill University, Montreal, Quebec, Canada, H3A 2T7
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Abstract

The gesture-call practices of early hominids were of a different order from those of their primate relatives, the ancestors of present day apes. The Tool-Cue Model postulates how our ancestors might have used tools both as functional instruments and as icons. The central thesis of the model treats communication as action systems mediated by signs, the central communicative action being the action cue: a communicative act that requires further behaviours to be satisfied. Tools are interpreted as framing devices, promoting the emergence of pragmatic/semantic duality. This latter feature is based on grammatical structures that include pragmatic and semantic meanings in the same utterance. Human language, i.e. symbolic pragmatics, appropriated the action cue meaning of tools and, simultaneously, transformed tools into symbolic ‘warrants’ by which modern humans transform both their speech and material behaviours into the types of social activities we intend. Post-Oldowan Lower and Middle Pleistocene lithics serve as empirical evidence in support of the Tool-Cue Model.

Type
Articles
Information
Cambridge Archaeological Journal , Volume 9 , Issue 1 , April 1999 , pp. 23 - 41
Copyright
Copyright © The McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research 1999

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