Posted in News on Mar 12, 2025.
ECOLITHIC is the acronym of “A Radical Ecosystems View of Lithic Macro-Evolution” – a collaborative research project funded by the Volkswagen Foundation from 2025-2028 in its funding line Pioneering Research – Exploring the Unknown Unknown.
The project seeks to integrate diverse bodies of theory across the humanities and the life sciences and to develop a radical macro-scale and long-term perspective on early stone tool and stone working technologies in early human evolution, testing the hypothesis that large-scale technological worlds can be modelled as dynamic ecosystems with heterogeneous interactive, self-organizing components.
ECOLITHIC thereby aims to address a series of “unknown unknowns” seriously curtailing ongoing investigations of Palaeolithic technology and its millennial-scale evolution.
The project brings together a dedicated group of international collaborators to facilitate theory-work and methodological implementation and to discuss new avenues for interdisciplinary research on deep-time technological evolution.
Discover more here.
