This challenge remains despite the current resurgence of raw material and use-wear studies, holistic assemblage-scale analyses, and advanced experimental and quantitative approaches. Inferring behavior with potentially adaptive significance from the stone artifact record has been a major challenge in our field from its inception. We argue for a more rigorous and multi-level inferential procedure in modeling behavioral adaptation and evolution. To infer behavior that could inform on past lifeways, we further promote a shift in the focus of analysis from the technological and morphological appearance of artifacts and assemblages to the practice of stone use. By invoking some of the known concerns and concepts about the formation of archaeological record, we introduce notions of aggregates and formational emergence to expand on the understanding of how artifacts accumulate, what these accumulations represent, and how the patterns and variability among them emerge. Here we re-evaluate this conventional approach. An equally persistent routine involves ascribing the emerged patterns and variability within the archaeological deposits directly to long-term central tendencies in human actions and cultural transmission. This analytical focus on technological and morphological appearance is one of the characteristics of the conventional approach for constructing inferences from this record. With the predominant focus on their morphological attributes and technological aspects of manufacture, stone artifacts and their assemblages have been analyzed as explicit measures of past behaviors, adaptations, and population histories. The stone artifact record has been one of the major grounds for investigating our evolution.
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