Signals in stone: Exploring the role of social information exchange, conspicuous consumption, and costly signaling theory in lithic analysis

Stone tools are most often seen and studied as utilitarian objects. However, as with other types of material culture, lithics may have played an important role in the creation of identity and the negotiation of interpersonal relationships for people in the past. As a result, archaeologists interested in lithic technological organization should consider not just the function of stone tools to cut, scrape, or pierce; but also their social function. One evolutionary approach that links stone tool production, use, and discard with the potential social meaning and information that these tools have shared is costly signaling theory. Originating in biology and human behavioral ecology, costly signaling theory is concerned with wasteful and "uneconomic" displays that impact reproductive fitness and has been used successfully by several researchers to explain behaviors in humans and nonhuman animals. However, some researchers have identified existing archaeological applications of costly signaling theory as "just-so-stories" (Codding and Jones 2007), a crutch for inexplicable phenomena or seemingly illogical behavior in the archaeological record. Although costly signaling theory is a fertile theoretical approach, it is important that archaeological applications of costly signaling theory are grounded in the theory as well as the archaeological data. To make costly signaling theory a sound scientific approach, we must build models, develop hypotheses, and test them using the archaeological record.