Great Stone Project 2022 :
The notion that people are nested within their environments, that the geological landscape is largely immutable but that ‘human landscapes’ are relatively short lived runs through this series of Blog articles. So it is with this Blog entry and series of images.
Material culture is fundamental to being human. Things are the medium through which we act, understand ourselves and relate to each other. They habituate our reflexes, make meanings concrete and intervene as agents in our lives. This is as true now as it has been throughout several million years of human evolution. Primates and other animals use tools; we became truly human when the first primate used a tool and then did not put it down afterwards. Because material culture is so omnipresent in human life, studying “material culture” can become a catch-all, encompassing almost anything from philosophical disquisitions on being human to nitty-gritty description of pottery typologies.
