ARTIFACT

Why these paper clips have gained such widespread popularity is a functional mystery but a fine example of the role aesthetics and style can play in the evolution of artifacts. --Henry Petroski (The Evolution of Useful Things, 1992)

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- A resourceful convict braided dental floss into a makeshift rope and used it [to] scale an 18-foot jailhouse wall and escape. --Nancy Nussbaum (1994)

It [the Spalding Allen collection of Nez Perce shirts, hats, and other objects collected in the 1840s] definitely has historical and cultural value to our children, their children and their grandchildren. These artifacts should be located here in Nez Perce country [i.e., in Idaho rather than in Ohio]. --Allen Slickpoo Sr., Nez Perce tribal historian (Kenworthy 1995:A3)


Durable sign. A material object (e.g., a consumer product) deliberately fabricated by humankind.

Usage: Like gestures, artifacts have a great deal to "say." The simplest message transmitted by an artifact is, "Something manmade is here" (Givens 1982:172). "Manmade" (i.e., intelligently fabricated by humans) is evident in a. the deliberately patterned shape, b. the grammatical syntax (i.e., the structured arrangement of parts), and c. the negative entropy encoded in artifacts as material signs, signals, and cues.

Word origin. The word artifact comes from the Latin arte ("by skill") factum ("made"; via the ancient Indo-European root dhe-, "to set," "to put," derivatives of which include deed, did, and do; skill "by hand" is implied).

Anthropology I. 1. "At dozens of archaeological sites in Africa, razor-sharp stone flakes and round hammer-stones mark the handiwork of anonymous craftspeople who forged tools as early as 2.6 million years ago" (Gibbons 1997:32). 2. In 2018, a ca. 11,000-12,000-year-old burial site of a lone woman's skeletal remains and likely hunting artifacts--stone burnishing tools, choppers, flakes (unmodified and retouched), projectile points, and scrapers--was discovered in the Andes mountain highlands. The spatial proximity (see PROXEMICS) of her remains with the stone artifacts suggests that men and women hunted during this time.

Anthropology II: Chipped stone tools. Humans have made and used stone tools since the advent of Oldowan flaked-stone implements in the Lower Paleolithic period, 2.6 million years ago. Flaking a stone tool and uttering a word use some of the same and closely related brain areas. So nearly alike are neural pathways for manual dexterity and articulate speech that a stone tool may be deciphered as if it were a petrified phrase.

Anthropology III: Physical traces of thought. English "handaxe," for example, and the perception of the worked stone for which it stands, both exist as mental concepts whose neural templates are linked in the brain. "When an object is seen or its name read, knowledge of attributes is activated automatically and without conscious awareness" (Martin et al. 1995, p. 102). Broca's area, the premotor-cortex module that governs language production, has been implicated in tool-making as well (Stout and Chaminade 2011). As Hauser noted, "When we create an artifact such as a tool, we leave a physical trace of our thoughts" (2000, p. 22).

Anthropology IV: Intelligently fabricated. In accord with Gibson's (1993) linkage of tool use with food sharing, there is general agreement that human artifacts and tools played a major role in the origin of language (Gibson and Ingold 1993). An artifact is a material object (e.g., a bifacial stone tool) deliberately fabricated by humankind. Like gestures, artifacts have a great deal to "say." That they are intelligently fabricated is evident in their deliberately patterned shape, grammatical syntax--structured arrangement of parts--and orderly negative entropy in design.

Duncan Yo-Yo. The yo-yo "speaks" nonverbally to our visual, spatial, tactile, and kinesthetic senses in a colorfully kinetic dialogue (see SUPERBALL). The yo-yo (Tagalog for "come back") evolved from a Philippine hunting tool made from a softball-size stone tied to a length of plant vine or a leather thong which enabled throwers to retrieve the weapon with a simple flick of the wrist (Hoffman 1996). The modern yo-yo thus has a great deal of physics, prehistory, and hunting lore encoded in its maple, beech, or plastic form (see below, Neuro-notes III).

Lego. European and U.S. children express themselves nonverbally through the whimsical artifacts they build with Lego bricks (made of the plastic, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene). In Latin, Lego means "I put together" (Hoffman 1996). The number of artifacts that may be fabricated from Lego's 1,700 differently shaped bricks is inestimable (as is the number of sentences that may be fabricated from the vocabulary of words).

"Mondrian's Pipe and Glasses"--Street photography. Hungarian born photographer Andre Kertesz took this photo in 1926. The ordinary artifacts "speak" to our artistic sensitivities. (To see his classic street photo, please click HERE.)

Prehistory Ia: Oldest sign artifacts. "The oldest human sign artifacts, consisting of engraved animal bones such as the Bordes ox-rib, date to perhaps 300,000 B.P. [before present] from the pre-Neanderthal period in France (Marshack, 1971; 1975). The symbolism is as yet unexplained; however, the V-shaped engravings appear to be constructed--distinctively patterned--rather than natural, so a quite general message, 'made by man,' reaches the contemporary receiver" (Givens 1982:161).

Prehistory Ib: Java clamshell inscriptions. Subsequently discovered are the likely intelligent fabrications found in a 500,000-year-old engraved inscription on the surface of a petrified, Indonesian freshwater-bivalve (Pseudodon sp.) shell, originally collected in the 1890s on the Solo River by physician Eugene Dubois, and later analyzed by Stephan Monro and colleagues from 2007 until 2014. The cortical planning involved—in tandem with the advanced manual dexterity evident in a precise geometric, shark-tooth-engraved zig-zag pattern—resembling today’s capital letter “M”—attest to the ability of Homo erectus to communicate information via linguistic signs.

Prehistory II: Sculpted figures. 1. "Starting about 40,000 years ago with Homo sapiens sapiens, the archeological record evidences what can be termed a semiotic 'explosion,' a proliferation in human sign-making activities" (Givens 1978:161). 2. " . . . realistically carved animal and human forms appear in Germany's Vogelherd Cave (dating to 30,000 B.P.); as does the French figurine, the Venus of Laussel (dated to 22,000 B.P.). Such signs convey not only 'made by man' and 'man was here,' but rather more complicated messages: 'horse,' 'lion,' 'leopard,' 'bear,' 'bison,' 'mammoth,' 'human adult female,' and perhaps even such qualities as 'standing,' 'awake,' 'bowed head,' 'stretched neck,' and so on" (Givens 1982:161-62).

Tinkertoy. A second multi-part construction toy (see above, Lego) is the Tinkertoy, created in the U.S. in the 1920s. This "meta-artifact" (i.e., an artifact from which other artifacts may be made) was invented by stone mason Charles Pajeau, who ". . . noticed how much fun his own children had sticking pencils into empty spools of thread, then haphazardly assembling them into all sorts of abstract forms" (Hoffman 1996:91; see HANDS, Later signs). Lockheed has used Tinkertoy's nonverbal components to test airplane artifacts, including fuselage and wing designs.

RESEARCH REPORTS: 1. By the age of five, the typical American child has owned 250 artifacts (i.e., toys; Rosemond 1992). 2. The Tasmanian islanders (who lived off the southeastern coast of Australia) are known to anthropologists as the people who made and used the least number of artifacts of any cultural group in history. In all, the Tasmanian islanders used a total of ca. 25 stone and wooden tools, fiber baskets, shell necklaces, ropes, and bark canoes (Diamond1993). 3. And yet, the contrast between U.S. consumers, e.g., and Tasmanians is not marked, because the total time spent handling, repairing, exchanging, and communicating with and about artifacts may be roughly the same everywhere (see OBJECT FANCY). (N.B.: A case in point is Tibet, where material goods are scarce--and yet where monks nonetheless spend hours each day spinning cylindrical prayer wheels.)

Hand-held. Archaeologists define artifacts as portable objects (e.g., beads, arrowheads, and car keys) which are small enough to carry. In a lifetime, we handle millions of artifacts which "speak" to us through their colors, textures, aromas, and sounds (see MESSAGING FEATURE). (N.B.: The Smithsonian Institution is home to ca. 140 million "objects" [Bliss 1994:3], all of which--including insects, meterorites, and tropical plants--may be classed as artifacts because they have undergone S.I.'s preservation, stabilization, and/or mounting process.)

Neuro-notes I. 1. "Areas and pathways subserving object and spatial vision are segregated in the visual system. Experiments show that the primate prefrontal cortex is similarly segregated into object and spatial domains. . . . . These findings indicate that the prefrontal cortex contains separate processing mechanisms for remembering 'what' and 'where' an object is" (Wilson et al. [Science] 1993:1955). 2. "When an object is seen or its name read, knowledge of [its] attributes is activated automatically and without conscious awareness" (Martin et al. [Science] 1995:102; see WORD, Neuro-notes III). 3. "The visual system separates processing of an object's form and color ('what') from its spatial location ('where'). In order to direct action to objects, the identity and location of those objects . . ." may be integrated with help from neurons in the primate brain's prefrontal cortex (Rao, Rainier, and Miller [Science] 1997:821).

Neuro-notes II. According to PET imaging studies, artifact picture identification activates the left brain hemisphere (specifically, the dorsolateral frontal and temporal cortex [Perani et al. 1999].) (Animal picture identification, on the other hand, activates both the right and left occipital regions [Perani et al. 1999]).

Neuro-notes III. "When we create an artifact such as a tool, we leave a physical trace of our thoughts" (Hauser 2000:22).

Neuro-notes IV. As we indicated in 1999 in our entry for SPEECH, tool making, gesture, and speaking are closely linked in the brain. Now, consider Atsushi Iriki's recent abstract for the 2012 conference on "Mirror Neurons: New Frontiers 20 Years After Their Discovery": "The brain mechanisms that subserve tool use may bridge the gap between gesture and language--the site of such integration seems to be the parietal and extending opercular cortices."

See also NONVERBAL LEARNING.

YouTube Video: Ancient Artifacts

Copyright 1998 - 2022 (David B. Givens/Center for Nonverbal Studies)
Illustration of African Oldowan chopping tool, ca. 1.9 million years old (a material object deliberately fabricated by humankind; picture credit: unknown)