Lithic Procurement in Central Australia: A Closer Look at Binford's Idea of Embeddedness in Archaeology

Field surveys of lithic sites in Central Australia and experimental tests of materials from these sites permit evaluation of Binford's (1979) concept of embeddedness. While basically agreeing with Binford's view that raw material procurement by mobile hunter-gatherers occurred incidentally in relation to other subsistence activities, our results indicate that Binford's argument cannot account for patterning in raw material procurement based on the utilitarian properties of the materials themselves. In dealing with questions of raw material procurement, we propose that controlled efforts be made to evaluate the technological characteristics of materials vis-a-vis the mechanical forces involved in their known or presumed uses before assuming the degree to which their procurement was structured by subsistence factors.