Raw material acquisition is fundamental to any technology. Modern engineers carefully consider the costs and advantages of potential building materials before ground is ever broken, weighing budgetary constraints against structural integrity, for example. People of the prehistoric past were faced with similar decisions both within and apart from formal economies. This chapter considers lithic raw material procurement from an evolutionary perspective, using a model that predicts the amount of tool use necessary to warrant investment in hard to obtain, high-quality raw materials when local but less-good ones are available.

Models that use objective scales of optimal behavior have been applied to archaeological records with appreciable success. A majority of these have focused on aspects of optimal foraging, predicting subsistence behaviors and their attendant patterns of mobility given certain environmental and, to a lesser degree, social or technological parameters (eg Basgall 1987; Bettinger and Baumhoff 1982; Bettinger et al. 1997; Broughton 1997; Hildebrandt and McGuire 2002; Jones 2004; Madsen and Schmitt 2003; Waguespack and Surovell 2003). Although economic models have provided some areas of archaeological research with fresh interpretations and falsifiable hypotheses, studies of stone technology have not made extensive use of such models (for important exceptions, see Beck et al. 2002; Brantingham 2003; Jeske 1992; Surovell 2009). This is not to say that modern lithic analysis lacks reference to economic decisions. Indeed, as Brantingham (2003: 504) observes, many lithic studies assume that