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.

This chapter considers social history in a postcolonialcontest. It specifically examines how the history ofthe majority culture in a post-settler society hasbeen and might be curated. Using Aotearoa NewZealand as its case study, it considers the figureof the Pākehā (non-indigenous) curator in relationto, and also in contrast with, Indigenouscollections and displays. What does a historycurator look like in a post-settler society? Doesthe history curator continue the mutual asymmetrythat has characterised relations and curatorialendeavours? Or is there a way to recognisecross-cultural material histories? In consideringthe development of history, and specifically socialhistory, it suggests that a more useful concept ismaterial history, rather than historical materialcultures studies. The rest of the chapter rangesacross a broad range of material history, includingfashion and clothing, and design, to consider howcontemporary museums deal with everyday life and itsmaterial aspects in museums, which are still to alarge extent focused on discrete objects and formsof material culture, and which carry the burden ofthe historical development of their collections intoa post-settler world.

This chapter examines the diversity of Neolithic cave burial practices after around 3800 BC. In this period there is evidence of a secondary burial rite which is focussed on the cranium. There is also one possible example of mummification or the curation of body parts as part of extended funerary practices. Other secondary burial rites can be recognised in a small number of sites. There are also a very small number of primary burials. The most common burial rite in this period is successive inhumation, which is well documented at a number of sites. There are also sites where multi-stage rites of some kind clearly took place, but without sufficiently well-preserved evidence to describe them in more detail; and other sites where there are Early Neolithic dates determined from poorly understood single bones. This diversity of burial practice seems to be linked to the fact that all of these different kinds of rite are also attested at other kinds of Early Neolithic site as well as caves.

Australia’s first Migration Museum in Adelaiderecognised from its inception in 1986 thatrepresenting migration history could not be donewithout acknowledging its intimate association withcolonisation and the dispossession of indigenouspeople. Its first move, therefore, was to create adistinction between all migrants, a category thatincluded British ‘settlers’, and IndigenousAustralians. This was significant not only becauseit implicated colonisation within migration historybut because it made all non-Indigenous Australiansmigrants. The move though, was not easy toestablish, largely because, in the publicimagination, migrants were the other to mainstreamor ‘British Australia’. In the mid-1990s, however,it seemed to work as Australia was indeed seen as acountry that was relatively successful inintegrating various waves of migration into itshistorical narratives while valuing culturaldiversity and recognising the prior occupation ofthe land by Aboriginal people. The ‘War on terror’,the arrival of asylum seekers and the threat ofinternal terrorist attacks, along with changes inimmigration policy and a general climate of fearhave changed that, and migration museums are nowworking to combat a new wave of racism. To do so, Iargue, they have developed a new set of curatorialstrategies that aim to facilitate an exploration ofthe complexity of contemporary forms of identity.This chapter provides a history of the developmentof curatorial strategies that have helped to changethe ways in which relations between ‘us’ and ‘them’have changed over the years in response to changesin the wider public discourse. My focus is on bothcollecting and display practices, from changes towhat is collected and how it is displayed, to thechanging role of personal stories, the relationshipbetween curators and the communities they work with,and the role of exhibition design in structuring thevisitor experience.

This chapter introduces two important questions for the study. It looks at the possible relationships between Neolithic cave burial and other Neolithic burial practices. It then introduces the important idea that caves and other natural places had agency and were actively incorporated into funerary rites. The chapter also introduces the data set used in the book: forty-eight cave sites in Britain with Neolithic radiocarbon dates on human remains. The chapter concludes by reviewing problems in interpreting this data and introduces the theoretical themes discussed in the following chapters: temporality, object agency and funerary ritual.

This concluding chapter starts by restating the importance of the intermediary period as a key to understanding funerary practice. The agency of bodies, objects and caves is central to how we understand this intermediary period. The temporality of the intermediary period is shown to be constituted by physical indices of change. This is explored by contrasting the temporality of secondary burial rites with the temporality of successive inhumation in both caves and cairns. The agency of caves is examined through studies of cave orientation and of the way that tufa and pre-existing middens act as both indices and agents of change in burials. The chapter concludes by integrating many of these approaches in two case studies of relational landscapes of Neolithic cave burial in South Wales and North Yorkshire. It is concluded that the material narratives of change around cave burial in the Neolithic led to the development of a specific rite of cave burial after around 3300 BC.