by Rae Bruml Norton
Nathan Schlanger is Professor of Archaeology at École nationale des chartes, Paris. His research concerns the history and politics of material culture and archaeology. He has edited or coedited several volumes, including Marcel Mauss: Techniques, Technology and Civilization (Berghahn, 2006), Archives, Ancestors, Practices: Archaeology in the Light of its History (2008),and European Archaeology: Identities & Migrations (Sidestone, 2017).
He has recently authored The Invention of Technology: An Intellectual History with André Leroi-Gourhan (Cambridge University Press, 2026; previously published in French by PUF).[i] Schlanger’s book covers André Leroi-Gourhan’s contributions to the study of techniques. Though an erstwhile student of Marcel Mauss and employee of Paris’s Musée de l’Homme, Leroi-Gourhan’s methods and interests exceeded the disciplinary bounds of anthropology or archaeology. In following the influences on and of Leroi-Gourhan, Schlanger charts how technology, as the study of techniques, became a central object to those disciplines and to the study of the human. Rae Bruml Norton interviewed Nathan Schlanger at the École nationale des chartes, Paris on April 27, 2026. An edited transcript is presented below.
Rae Bruml Norton: I want to begin with what you call André Leroi-Gourhan’s “referential dearth,” by which you describe the minimal use he makes of citations across his publications. At the same time, your research demonstrates that his work resulted from a dense accumulation of interlocutors, concepts, methods, and disciplines. What is it about this “referential dearth” that makes Leroi-Gourhan such an interesting figure for the intellectual historian?
Nathan Schlanger: What is interesting about the “referential dearth” of André Leroi-Gourhan is the (in)discipline it reflects. Here is someone who managed to absorb a lot of diverse knowledge and sit on the benches of different faculties without acquiring—or at least without acknowledging—what we consider to be standard disciplinary practices, such as getting acquainted with current canons, problem areas, methodologies, position statements, or indeed bibliographies. In several respects, this was a drawback for Leroi-Gourhan, but in many others it represented an incredible advantage. He was able to roam across different fields, ask different questions, and address different theories and ideological positions. He did this in a way that was minimally constrained by specific data or approaches and often also without realizing the contradictions or incompatibilities of many of the arguments that he advanced over the years.
RBN: Did this make your research more difficult?
NS: Well, it made it both more difficult and more fascinating. It made it all the more necessary to situate Leroi-Gourhan in his own diversified research and intellectual milieux. One obviously has to be aware of the different fields which might be pertinent to his work. Leroi-Gourhan himself, in some of his more autobiographical moments, talked about the range of disciplines through which he worked, from Chinese and Russian studies and art history to animal anatomy and paleontology, behavioral psychology and, later on, to archaeological excavations and prehistoric rock art. In each of these fields, his (in)discipline rendered him both highly knowledgeable anddifficult to pin down.
RBN: Should we understand the term (in)discipline differently from the term interdisciplinary?
NS: Indeed, Leroi-Gourhan was not really an interdisciplinary scholar in the sense that we understand and aim for today. This is what interested me so much about him—in addition, of course, to his own highly original contributions to archaeology and technology. He very rarely set out, at least explicitly, to bring a single body of knowledge or single approach from a discipline to bear on a different disciplinary domain. The fruitful connections he made across disciplines and bodies of knowledge were based rather on evocative concepts and keywords: tendency and facts, behavior, chaîne opératoire (operational sequence), memory, equilibrium, overtaking, emancipation, and the polysemous notion of liberation.
RBN: The editors of the JHI Blog’s forum on technology write, “at every level, technologies and concepts codevelop,” but that there is not “a sustained engagement between intellectual history and the history of technology.” I want to propose that your book does the work of bridging the gap between these two fields. What is Leroi-Gourhan’s concept of technology? What are the conditions that make it possible for him, as the title of the book suggests, to invent technology?
NS: This brings us to this other set of central keywords: “technology” and (or versus) “techniques.” In the French research tradition, technology was long understood to be the field dedicated to the study of techniques (like musicology to music). This is already perceptible in the late nineteenth century with, for example, Alfred Espinas’s Les origines de la technologie (1897), subtitled Étude sociologique, which dealt not with the deep Paleolithic but with the earliest systematic descriptions of physical and theological praxeology in ancient Greece. By the first half of the twentieth century, chiefly thanks to the contribution of Marcel Mauss (1872–1950), “technology” was understood as logos: the discourse on techniques within the human and social sciences, including such fields as sociology, ethnology and archaeology. In fact, as Leroi-Gourhan practiced it for many years, technology is a branch of ethnology, and techniques, as he once defined them, are observable, “materially creative activities” (activités matériellement créatrices).
After the Second World War, this straightforward understanding of technology as the study of techniques became a bit blurred. Indeed, partly influenced by Anglo-Saxon usage, a notion of technology related to scientific knowledge, to mechanized industrial production, and more generally to modernity also emerged in France. This was distinct from and contrasted with an understanding of techniques as traditional, small-scale, tool-based, tacit activities. In general, the invention of technology, as in the title of my book, refers to the invention of the discipline, the approach, the discourse on techniques, and more generally the range of questions that scholars might want to raise about how humans collectively create their worlds and engage in materially creative activities.
RBN: Throughout his study of techniques, Leroi-Gourhan put a great emphasis on the manual. Examples include the Homo faber; the question of the “liberation of the hand,” the gesture, and its relationship to the chaîne opératoire; and his convictions about the necessity of a researcher’s hands-on experience. What is the role of the hand for Leroi-Gourhan, and how does it depart from his training under Marcel Mauss?
NS: Leroi-Gourhan was keen on experimentation, both in the sense of controlled replication of ethnographic or archeological tools or techniques and in a more psychological sense of experiencing and living through activities. You have to remember that he left school at fourteen, took on various jobs to earn his living, and also worked in a library specialized in crafts and applied arts. A keen player of musical instruments, he also became later an accomplished horse rider. He gave a central role to this corporality. This experimental skill and sensitivity served him to critique and to better understand how objects were produced and used through gestures of percussion and of cutting. He would, for example, debate with museum curators, including at the Musée de l’Homme, about the ways to display objects and tools that would make it possible for the visitors to understand the ways they were used.
Leroi-Gourhan had followed Marcel Mauss’s teaching on technology from the early 1930s through 1937, when Leroi-Gourhan left for Japan (returning in 1939). The other technology student recognized by Mauss was André-Georges Haudricourt (1911–1996) who followed Mauss’s 1935 program of “techniques of the body” more closely, studying the ways people carried objects or dressed in different civilizations. Leroi-Gourhan took Mauss’s program in slightly different directions, partly because from early on in his research he included paleontological and evolutionary dimensions.
This orientation can be seen in the way Leroi-Gourhan discusses the “liberation” of the hand. This key notion conveyed a political statement related to the end of German occupation after the Second World War and also a notion of freedom to pursue equilibrium or spirituality. As his later readers G. Deleuze and F. Guattari saw it, this liberation amounted to a form of deterritorialization. When humans evolved to a bipedal and erect posture, their hands were released from locomotion to manipulation, and the face became free for perception and ultimately for language. The mouth was no longer used as an organ to grasp, and the prognathism that Leroi-Gourhan traced to the vertebrates such as the alligator, the horse, or even the monkey was reduced, allowing for the expansion of the braincase (neurocranium). In other words, a reinforcing process saw brain capacity increasing as the hands became free. Leroi-Gourhan presented this wide-ranging theory in Le Geste et la parole (Gesture and Speech), and it is precisely this cumulative process which, to get back to your question, took him quite a distance away from what Marcel Mauss had in mind with his more sociological and ethnographic “techniques of the body.”
RBN: In your book, we learn that Leroi-Gourhan drew metaphors between the brain and the computer and even wished that his ethnographer colleagues had brains like computers. Is there a contradiction that you noticed in his work between a strong emphasis on the manual and then also a strong emphasis on the brain as a computer?
NS: Though, as we discussed earlier, he was very tolerant of contradictions, I don’t think that he considered this to be one. He considered as continuous the process that went from manual gestures, tracings on the wall of the cave, to the first fixing of symbolic expressions, and then to ideograms and alphabetic writing, printing, and the delegation of memory onto external electronic devices. Already in 1952, he lectured at a meeting of the Cercle d’études cybernétiques on the Paleolithic origin of human rationality. Leroi-Gourhan could be ideologically conservative in several respects, but he was undeniably keen on modern techniques, including intellectual and material techniques for recording, generating and improving knowledge. At the same time, he persistently referred to the hand in a nostalgic mode—for example, the hand of Homo faber, whose ten fingers in action he thought embodied the specificity of being human. Le Geste et la parole combines these somewhat contradictory nostalgic and progressive views, where his insights on the technicity of machines, of animals, and of artisans all come together.
RBN: In the third chapter of your book, you discuss the 1949 publication of his paper “Note on the Relations between Technology and Sociology” in the Année sociologique in a section on techniques edited by Georges Friedmann. After this publication, Leroi-Gourhan was not invited back to write for the journal. Your account of this moment helped to crystallize for me Leroi-Gourhan’s ambiguous position on the relationship between labor, capital and technology. At the same time, you show that he was well aware of, and at times even pessimistic about, the various problems that modern technologies of the postwar period posed to the worker. Is it possible to use Leroi-Gourhan’s thought to critique the development of technologies in our time?
NS: Leroi-Gourhan never really participated in activities of the Année sociologique, whether in their journal or school. He was in fact quite ambivalent towards Marcel Mauss and the Durkheimians, partly because of his affinities with Bergsonian intuitionism, which he saw as antithetical to the Durkheimian sociological approach. The only paper he published in the Année sociologique is precisely this one from 1949, and with it he seems to burn the bridges. As he argued there, technology (the study of techniques) had little to do with sociology and should instead be understood as part of biology and human paleontology. This claim implicitly promoted an approach to the longue durée of technical activities, which were independent of what he called “political adventures.” Leroi-Gourhan’s relations with history, and with the Annales school, were likewise complex. Going beyond the factual immediacy of events (the “faits,” as he called them), he favored deep evolutionary trends (“tendances”) in which historical and political aspects could be cast as accidental. In any case, the early 1950s were a key moment in his intellectual development, as he abandoned his previous ethnographic and museological approaches to material civilizations and moved closer to animal behavior, to paleontology, and to his Catholic inspirations as well.
You asked about the critical utility of Leroi-Gourhan for us today. Leroi-Gourhan was known to philosophers and to thinkers already in the 1940s (G. Canguilhem, E. Mounier). But it was Le Geste et la Parole, published in two volumes in 1964 and 1965, that made him best known, notably to an Anglo-Saxon readership, through so-called “French theory.” Starting with Jacques Derrida, whose extended book review of Le Geste et la Parole, already in 1965, became De la grammatologie (1967). He was also taken up by Deleuze and Guattari, Roland Barthes, and others. More recently, Bernard Stiegler used Leroi-Gourhan’s views at several levels, including on questions of origins, evolution, and epiphylogenesis. While Leroi-Gourhan was recognized as an authority on prehistoric times, what Derrida and Stiegler were mostly interested in was the notion of program. The ways a machine functions, an animal behaves, and an artisan produces were all related to the unfolding of programs, an unfolding which was in turn said to be based on memory. Whether internal, genetic, or acquired by society, these memory-based programs could be exteriorized, for example, on the rock-art panel, as a text in a book, or in the form of a computer. This notion of program certainly contributed to Derrida’s critique of anthropocentrism and helped to open up dimensions of posthumanist thought in France and elsewhere.
RBN: Can you say more about what you called earlier the “Catholic inspirations” of Leroi-Gourhan? How did Catholicism shape his understanding of the longue durée?
Leroi-Gourhan was born into a secular, lower-middle-class background. He discovered faith in his adolescence and converted to Catholicism, partly influenced by young White Russian refugees with whom he was acquainted. The degree of Leroi-Gourhan’s piety is not clear, but there is no doubt that Catholicism had multiple, lasting influences on his way of thinking. A first influence took place during his time as a lecturer in colonial ethnology at the University of Lyon, from 1944 to 1956. In close contact there with missionaries and missionary societies, he set to examine the interface between the concepts of material civilization and spiritual civilization. He explored possibilities for dialogue and collaboration between missionaries, ethnographers, and technologists. The issue for him was not so much to evangelize the indigenous people of the earth, but rather to help them access modernity (as they inevitably would) with as few disruptions as possible.
The second phase took place after 1955, when Leroi-Gourhan contributed to the Centre catholique des intellectuels français, a very open-minded group of religious and secular scholars interested in the wider issues that affected contemporary postwar society. They took up questions of labor, gender, and industrialization, and they also explored the definition of the human. Leroi-Gourhan readily contributed to these meetings, but in a way that differed from the more empirically minded requirements of professional archaeological or paleontological milieux. Here, he was actually encouraged to speculate, and his attentive audience included clerics, philosophers, and linguists as well as engineers, physicists, social thinkers, and state functionaries. In many respects, these lectures during the mid-1950s represented “first drafts” of what became Le Geste et la parole.
In this context, Leroi-Gourhan did occasionally mention the providence or possibility that we all descended from a single couple, though he does not seem to have considered the fall from Eden. Here, his broader perspectives reflect the rising influence of Jesuit paleontologist Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, overriding that of Bergson. Upon his death in 1955, Teilhard left behind a vast literature that aimed to bring together the scientific and the spiritual; he invented the term “biosphere” (akin to the “noosphere”) and, of course, the concept of the “Omega Point” towards which humanity ultimately aimed. Since the Omega Point lay in the future, its trajectory needed to be traced as far back into the past as possible. Leroi-Gourhan’s prehistoric competencies became useful in retracing this long march towards spirituality, which confirmed that humans are both at the apex of evolution and an organic element amongst others.
RBN: I want to end with a question about fields. At the same time that you follow the invention of technology through Leroi-Gourhan, your book accounts for emerging fields and institutions in the twentieth century, such as the Musée de l’Homme, the École des Annales, cybernetics and cognitive archaeology. How did this wide range of fields and institutions shape the directions of your research? What does the field of archaeology offer to the history of the concept of technology?
NS: Some of the institutions or theoretical hubs you mention were really part of Leroi-Gourhan’s curriculum and career trajectory. He spent, for example, quite a few years at the Musée de l’Homme in its early years, alongside the likes of M. Leiris and C. Lévi-Strauss. He also corresponded with Lucien Febvre of the Annales school and asked him to oversee his ethnographic field school in 1947. And, as we mentioned, he did not hesitate to talk about stone tools at the society of cybernetics.
As for cognitive archaeology (the term is used here retrospectively), this is a topic I have been familiar with since I completed my own PhD research. Leroi-Gourhan asked himself, as a technologist, what can be inferred about ancient minds on the basis their material actions and their remains. Such a question implied a changing definition of homo faber: rather than conceiving it as a brutish, unthinking producer—a pre-sapiens—Leroi-Gourhan gradually realized that even the simplest stone tool manufacture required thought, foresight, and anticipation. In one of his papers from the early 1950s, which dealt with “the prehistoric mentality,” he began to focus on these sequences (enchaînement) of flintknapping production and on the possibility of following, flake by flake, the mental structure of the maker. This interest took quite a while to develop into a proper subfield, but Leroi-Gourhan was certainly, with his now-central notion of chaîne opératoire, one of the founders of this approach.
In 1958, Leroi-Gourhan published three consecutive papers on prehistoric parietal art in theBulletin de la Société Préhistorique Française. He believed that signification was immanent in the structuration of rock art, and he tried to show that the Aurignacians and the Magdalenians did not splash their paintings just anywhere, but rather placed them either at the entrance of the cave or in its depths and also produced recurrent associations of different animals and different figures with each other. This structuralist interpretation is not a version of the structuralism à la Lévi-Strauss but refers to a more basic understanding of structure as systematic organization. At least in part (and to relate to the previous question) this represented an attempt to link art and religiosity or spirituality, especially since this paleolithic art included mostly naturalistic animal representations and abstract signs, but no human figures. Emphasizing the structured nature of these representations enabled Leroi-Gourhan to claim that, even if we cannot know what is specifically signified or conveyed, we know that this art must have had spiritual meaning and, therefore, that a “paleontology of religion” is possible.
Then, in May 1964, the site of Pincevent south of Paris was discovered by quarry workers who unearthed flint scatters in what archaeologists call “primary position”—that is, apparently unmoved since they were originally deposited. Leroi-Gourhan was already involved in heritage management and rescue archaeology, and he immediately recognized the significance of the site as a 14,000-year-old Magdalenian hunting camp. Rather than excavating vertically to reconstruct chronological sequences (as in the case of the site of Arcy-sur-Cure he had been working in at the time), he was able here to undertake the horizontal excavation of this ephemerally occupied campsite, and thus reach and research, layer by layer, the daily life and material organization of its ancient inhabitants. Leroi-Gourhan was implicitly following here the emphasis on the ordinary existence of the “homme total,” as advocated long ago at the Musée de l’Homme, but he was also drawing on some methodological approaches and theoretical concerns specific to Russian and Soviet archaeology, which had encountered and published on sites of this kind since the early twentieth century (and whose reports Leroi-Gourhan could read fluently).
Pincevent became a famous school of excavation, and many researchers from all over the world came there to train and work, including American scholars students of Lewis Binford, the leader of the processualist school of “New Archeology.” Still excavated today, Pincevent is probably the longest-running continuous archaeological project on a prehistorical site and represents a signal methodological contribution in its own right. But, as we know, Leroi-Gourhan wore quite a few different hats, wrote for different publications and audiences and in different styles, and interacted with and was read by scholars from many different disciplines and milieus. While my focus in this book was definitely on the invention of technology, I also wanted to record these radiating influences and show their diverse and unpredictable impacts on the development of his own career—a career which reflects, in many respects, the overall development of the human and social sciences in twentieth-century France.
[i] The open-access anthology edited by Nathan Schlanger, André Leroi-Gourhan on Technology: A Selection of Writings from the 1930s to the 1960s (HAU, 2023), assembles the major writings of Leroi-Gourhan on technology, including some mentioned in this interview. One text not included, “The Origin and Dissemination of Scientific Knowledge,” has been published in translation in the open-access journal Technology and Language.
Rae Bruml Norton is a PhD candidate in Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. She specializes in the history of technology and media theory and is working on dissertation that charts the development of the computer mouse in the late twentieth century. Her research investigates how engineers in the emerging field of human-computer interaction reconstituted relationships between intellectual and manual labor.
Edited by Zac Endter.
Featured image: André Leroi-Gourhan, sketch of flintknapping through prehistoric times. Preparatory drawings for the popular book Hommes de la préhistoire. Les chasseurs (Éditions Bourellier 1955, published in English as The Hunters of Prehistory). The thinner flake removals enable better control over the shape of the Acheulean biface. Source: Arch. MSH.M-ALG 70-6. Reproduced with permission of the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme, Paris.