However, the paths followed immediately diverged, and, forty to fifty years later, the gap has not been bridged. Mutual ignorance or incomprehension remain predominant. The present essay was undertaken to try to understand what appears to be a rather unique situation, since scientific exchanges are common in many other domains of prehistoric research. In France and in North America, technological approaches were essentially developed to address the question of the variability of lithic assemblages.
The factors of variability thus brought to light, such as mobility patterns or time stress, were transcultural and always related to environmental conditions, whether directly or indirectly.
In the meantime, French scholars, before trying to explain lithic variability, were developing analytical tools able to bring to light the whole range of this variability, from the conception to the production of the tools, going beyond the static typological categories used thus far. At the same time, new and long-lasting concepts were explored on both side of the Atlantic : knowledge and know-how, transmission and apprenticeship, individual variability.
But cross-references would be short lived : developed in answer to different questions, these concepts were investigated differently and applied to different scientific perspectives. These French approaches, despite their widespread applications, do not refer to specific theories and were never given a theoretical name.
This may be one of the reasons why they were not adopted in the States. These last two approaches are certainly closer to French sensibility and scientific questioning, but they retain from earlier developments of Anglo-Saxon technological approaches the will to validate the interpretations through quantitative models and continue to give important weight to the notion of optimisation, totally foreign to French interpretative frameworks.
