By the 1950s, the concept of ‘behaviour’ gained a central place: technology was now defined as the study of technical behaviour. This broadened considerably the field of investigation. Like other forms of behaviour, technical behaviour was not limited to humans but could also be found throughout the animal world, from the stimulus-response of insects to the complex sequences displayed by mammals. Besides its biological and evolutionary implications, this notion of technical behaviour shifted attention from objects and products to technical actions and gestures. On these aspects, Leroi-Gourhan was influenced by contemporary advances in animal psychology and ethology, with their description of instinct – or memory-based chains of physical actions. In parallel, Leroi-Gourhan also outlined an ethnological version of the chaîne opératoire, distinguishing between elementary, ordinary and extraordinary technical practices – the latter requiring the presence of consciousness and of language.

As he developed his technological interests in the setting of the Musée de l’Homme, Leroi-Gourhan was particularly attentive to the description and documentation of material objects. Cardboard fiches (index cards) with standardized entries – name, function, material, location of finding, etc. – served to ‘bring the milieu of the object’ back into the museum. During his fieldwork in Japan from 1937 to 1939, Leroi-Gourhan refined his documentary approaches, combining ethnographic photographs and object collections. Back in France, however, following the defeat and German occupation, this mass of accumulated fiches became less compelling, especially when Leroi-Gourhan discovered Henri Bergson’s Creative Evolution (1907) with its élan vital and intuitionist philosophy. This notably inspired him to develop the distinction between technical ‘facts’, which are unstable and localized, and technical ‘tendencies’, which are stable, wide-ranging and deterministic. These two concepts, outlined in Evolution et techniques (1943, 1945), characterized his approach to technical phenomena and material civilizations.

Another central concept or entity which Leroi-Gourhan drew from Bergson was Homo faber. In a brief but influential passage of Creative Evolution, Bergson posited that fabrication, making with materials, was a defining human trait. Intelligence was not for contemplation but rather for action, for producing artificial objects and tools. This Homo faber and its creative intelligence received mixed reactions. While the emphasis on techniques and their role in human history was welcomed by historian Henri Berr and by Marcel Mauss, the latter also stressed their fundamentally collective and rational dimensions, rather than individual or organic ones. At the same time, many prehistorians and philosophers of the time readily assumed an evolutionary sequence from primitive Homo faber to developed Homo sapiens. Until the 1950s, Leroi-Gourhan too held such views, considering the most ancient remains of technical activities (stone tool manufacture and use) too crude to be of much informative value.

The end of the War saw an expansion in the aims and contents of technology. Upon his appointment to the University of Lyon, Leroi-Gourhan quickly acquired fieldwork and training experience in ethnology and also in prehistoric archaeology. This led him to pay greater attention to the achievements of experimental flintknapping (as notably practised by François Bordes). Studying the different techniques used throughout prehistory for knapping stone tools could serve to characterize distinct epochs and civilizations, but also, so claimed Leroi-Gourhan from 1950 onwards, to ‘follow the gestures, flake by flake, [so as] to reconstruct with certainty an important part of the mental structure of the maker’. This innovative search for the ‘prehistoric mentality’ sets Leroi-Gourhan as a forerunner of ‘cognitive archaeology’, and it also led him to formulate the concept of the chaîne opératoire, which follows processes of manufacture and use from raw material to finished product.

This introductory chapter presents the main topics and orientations of the book. Its subject matter is the invention of technology, that is, the study of techniques in the twentieth-century human and social sciences – as grasped through the fundamental contributions made by André Leroi-Gourhan (1911–1986). Biographical background on his life and career highlights Leroi-Gourhan’s wide-ranging scientific productions in such fields as ethnology, museology, orientalism, art history, palaeontology, behavioural psychology and prehistoric archaeology, and indeed the archaeology and anthropology of techniques. The breadth of these contributions reflects a diversity of interests, but also a form of eclecticism or ‘in-discipline’. Alongside long-standing investments in documentary and experimental practices, his writings were structured around several conceptual keywords (‘techniques’, ‘milieu’, élan vital, Homo faber, ‘liberation’, ‘exteriorization’, chaîne opératoire) which varied over time and in function of their uses. In addition, Leroi-Gourhan’s extensive archives make it possible to address the literary ambitions and intellectual practices of the scientist in action.

How does one become a technologist? While the study of techniques in the social sciences can be traced to the turn of the twentieth century, Leroi-Gourhan was quite clear about his own original contribution to this emerging field. In some of his reflexive texts, he mentioned the likes of Anatole Lewitsky, Arnold Van Gennep, André-Georges Haudricourt and also Lewis Mumford, author of Technics and Civilisation. Above these dominate the formative influence of Marcel Mauss and of Paul Rivet. In his teaching at the Institut d’ethnologie, Mauss emphasized the inherently social dimensions of techniques, including the traditional and efficient techniques of the body, with or without instruments. From Rivet, the director of the Musée de l’Homme, where he spent the first decade of his career, Leroi-Gourhan absorbed his museographic and ethnological outlooks, including his interest in ordinary or daily-life objects as markers of cultural identities and contacts.

This concluding chapter draws together several strands and original dimensions of Leroi-Gourhan’s technology. Alongside his palaeontological and archaeological research, Leroi-Gourhan also addressed two seemingly contradictory dimensions of techniques: the machine and the artisan. Given his long-standing interest in machines and mechanical devices, including photography, film and also computers, Leroi-Gourhan’s quasi-cybernetic understanding of prehistoric flintknapping is less surprising. Moreover, such a broadly positive attitude towards modern techniques needs to be understood in relation to philosophical and intellectual debates emerging during the post-war years of economic and social reconstruction. While thinkers like Jacques Ellul emphasized the risks of disruption and loss of control associated with modern techniques, Leroi-Gourhan retained, on the whole, his technophile confidence in the cumulative and incremental continuity of techniques, as demonstrated (in his view) across prehistory. This approach also derived from his distinctive Catholic faith and his affinities with the thoughts of Jesuit-palaeontologist Teilhard de Chardin. It embodied his belief in the long-term redemptive capacities of techniques, as evidenced by the plenitude achieved by the artisan of all times who ‘thinks with his fingers’, a crafting Homo faber present in each and every one of us.