Paleontologist and archaeologist Glynn Isaac was a prolific and influential writer, whose work in Africa still resonates today. Here is a quotation from his seminal tome on Olorgesailie.
Most paleolithic archeologists ... tend to believe that the assemblages of humanly flaked stones that we recover in quantities from sites such as Olorgesailie preserve a great deal of valuable information about the craft traditions, the cultural affinities, and the economic life of the hominids who made them. This belief is in part a matter of faith, and there is a danger that in our enthusiasm we may overextend the exegesis of stone artifacts. It sometimes appears that all of us treat stone artifacts as infinitely complex repositories of paleocultural information and assume that it is only the imperfections of our present analytical systems that prevent us from decoding them. But is this really so? (Isaac 1977:207)
Source
Glynn Isaac. 1977 Olorgesailie: Archeological Studies of a Middle Pleistocene Lake Basin in Kenya. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
More on Glynn Isaac
Contributed by Tony Baker
