Complex Navigating the site:
Aymaran (Amerindians from the Andes) boat builders from Lake Titicaca in Bolivia.
[photograph, 1992, JVS.]
The above boat weavers need reeds that grow along the shores of Lake Titicaca high in the Andes. Their skill and knowledge of materials, production teams and organization of labor to acquire and repair the boats are all examples of --albeit a small one-- a tool complex based entirely on nature, human labor and a means of harvesting fish or transporting supplies along the lake.
Implements, devices, instruments and machinery, or more?
Surveyor's instrument, Consequences of survey instruments in US
When you look at any invention, or material object, you suddenly recognize that it is connected in a very precise and causal manner to related objects. This is particularly true of technology.
No tool exists in isolation from its users, their societies, or the imagination. But in a very literal sense tools that are the basis of the study of technology, are tied to other inventions, devices, utensils, products, patterns of wealth, implements and instruments.
The tool complex, then, is a way to understand this association of similar techniques and tools based on:
- sources of material (stone age, bronze age, iron age, plastic age)
- means of construction (hand made, mechanical, automated)
- types of fuel (wind, wood, coal, coke, oil, gas, nuclear, electrical)
- purpose to which the materials and means are employed:
LESSON
So any tool complex is specific to an age, place and set of conditions that must be described in relation to material culture and the level of wealth.
Metamorphosis in three varieties:
Tools of Toil: what to read. Tools are historical building blocks of technology.
