Engendering prehistoric technology? All it takes is practice

For more than a century, the study of prehistoric technology has been ruled by a “tyranny of the obvious”. An entrenched focus on instrumentality has projected into the pre-modern past the worst of modernity: alienation, fetishism, and rocentrism and the supposed neutrality of objective, dispassionate science. As little more than self-legitimating teleologies, the resulting simulacra have paradoxically erased the (en)gendered and socially constituted technician with the nightmarish “Homo faber technologicus”. This paper offers a radical alternative to conventional wisdom, guided by feminist and philosophical insights on embodiment and technology, and operationalized with the principles of practice theory. It redefines prehistoric technology as a word of embodied, meaningful, social (and hence gendered) interaction, and focuses methodological attention on the intertwined social, material and symbolic arenas in which gendered technicians created and negotiated their material world and, thus, themselves. Thus gender attribution is not sufficient for engendering prehistoric technology. Research on the European Upper Paleolithic era grounds the discussion