The idea of a ‘spoon’: semantics, prehistory, and cultural logic

•Uses NSM to articulate the full meaning of artefact concepts.•Shows the cultural logic of these artefacts, linking design with function and use.•Compares in detail the English idea of ‘spoon’ and the Chinese idea of ‘tāngchí’.•Vindicates the invention of a spoon as a significant development in human prehistory.•Shows the relevance of semantics to prehistory.

The invention of the spoon may not be quite as ground-breaking in human history as the invention of the wheel or the needle, but arguably it is also a significant conceptual (as well as technological) event. It has been claimed that “all people in the world use spoons”, that “spoons have been used as eating utensils since Paleolithic times”, that chimpanzees in Gombe use “sort-of-spoons”… Can we draw a line, in a principled and precise way, between ‘spoons’ and ‘sort-of’ spoons'? For example, is the so-called “Chinese spoon” (tāngchí) a ‘spoon’? Can we explain why a ‘tāngchí’ is different in many respects from a (‘European’) ‘spoon’ and similar in others? Most importantly, perhaps, can we reconstruct with any plausibility the conceptual model in the minds of the first prehistoric inventors of ‘spoons’? Can we tell in what part of the world they lived, when they lived, what they wanted to eat with those first ‘spoons’, and why they found ‘spoons’ more suited to their needs than something like ‘tāngchí’ (‘Chinese spoons’)? These are some of the questions that this paper will address, using as a tool NSM techniques of semantic and conceptual analysis.