70 years of Chaine operatoire: What French prehistorians have done with it

This paper is about the origin and development of the French school of Prehistoric Technology. Going back to the sources, the authors show how the concept of chaine operatoire, a concept proposed by Andre Leroi-Gourhan, who was both an anthropologist and a prehistorian, was first developed by social anthropologists, and then applied to the analysis of prehistoric lithics in strong connection with their anthropologist colleagues. The discovery of the open-air site of Pincevent (Seine-et-Marne, France) allowed Leroi-Gourhan to develop his ideas about an ethnographic approach to a prehistoric settlement. With this in mind, the refitting of flint artefacts, used to restore the debitage sequences, was systematically used for the first time. Interpreting these refits forced him to develop the chaine operatoire concept. At the same time, Jacques Tixier adopted this tool relying on the interpretation of experimental debitage practiced by his team. Pooling concepts developed by Tixier's team and Leroi-Gourhan's laboratory, practicing flint knapping, experimentation and flint core refitting led to developments that were at first about knapping techniques and methods. This cooperation helped refine the recognition of skill levels, from apprenticeship to high performance, and, beyond that, to identify individual knappers inferred from idiosyncratic knapping characteristics of refitted flint blocks. This work opened the way to the economic realm and social organization inferred from spatial analysis of Upper Palaeolithic living floors. Later use of this concept and of all lines of inquiry it opened, extended to every prehistoric period (from Early Palaeolithic, Neolithic and Bronze Age), to other countries and to other areas than lithics: bone, organic materials, ceramics, metal, archaeozoology and archaeology of mortuary practices. It lead to the development of adapted concepts and criteria, and new methods and techniques of observation and experimentation adapted to these materials or practices. While based on previous advances, two recent approaches focusing on the middle and long term open new directions of research. Thus, beyond these two interconnecting currents that developed around Leroi-Gourhan and Tixier, multiple interactions led to a reciprocal appropriation of these heritages giving the French chaine operatoire its characteristics: the interaction of ethnologists of cultural technology and prehistorians on this approach; an anthropological background implicit in the approach of prehistorians, becoming more explicit with the introduction of ethnoarchaeological data; rigorous and detailed empirical research at the base of the analytical process; backed up by reproducible experimental research; creation of original concepts for the production of lithic tools; taking into account psychomotor factors in the analysis of technical behavior; a posteriori models rather than a priori theoretical models; a diversification of applications by extension to neighboring domains. Given its flexibility, dynamic vision of processes and structural connection from the technical sphere to all human dimensions, the chaine operatoire is an effective mechanism for thinking about production processes and their place in society. In this article, we have tried to trace a path, to show the different development stages of this concept in France and to briefly report on the multiple avenues of research in which it became a stakeholder or centerpiece.