The identification and analysis of invention is fundamental to understanding early societies. Yet invention tends to be only sporadically addressed by archaeologists, and then usually only within broader studies of innovation. Doubts concerning the ability of the archaeological record to yield data of sufficient quality to investigate invention, together with the perception that the concept leads inevitably to nineteenth-century societal narratives of technological progress, remain widespread. This paper reviews the theoretical approaches to invention in early societies with a particular focus on pyrotechnologies. It highlights the papers within this special section, which demonstrate the capacity of an integrated approach incorporating materials science, archaeology and archaeological theory to understand the processes of both invention and innovation underlying the appearance of pyrotechnologies and their relationships to early societies throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and South America. It is argued that the importance of historical and contemporary debates on inventions, innovations and societies across the world continues to increase—and will do so with or without the active contribution of archaeologists.

Sub-Saharan Africa is often characterized by Europeans as a region that saw no significant technological change from the adoptions of agriculture and ironworking until the European colonization of the entire continent after 1880. This article criticizes this view by exploring the distinction between invention and innovation, using African iron smelting as a case study. It argues that there is in fact much evidence for the invention of new technologies in recent African prehistory, but that very low population densities precluded innovations in mass production and transportation.

The quest for the ‘when’ and ‘where’ of the world's earliest metallurgy has been dominating scholarly research on this topic for decades. This paper looks beyond the question of origins by discussing ‘how’ and ‘why’ metallurgy was invented. It looks into choices and skills involved in selection, experimentation and processing of distinctively coloured copper minerals and ores throughout c. 2000 years in the Balkans. The body of evidence is built around the currently earliest evidence for copper smelting, dated at c. 5000 bc and discovered in the Serbian Vinča culture site of Belovode. The ‘microstructure’ of a metal invention process is explored through optical and compositional analyses of a selection of copper minerals and metal production evidence: ores, slags, slagged sherds and metal droplets recovered from seven settlements in Serbia and Bosnia and Herzegovina, altogether dated between the late seventh and the late fifth millennia bc. This research suggests an independent technological trajectory of the emergence of metallurgy in the Balkans based on a unique technological meme, black and green mineral, which follows the evolution of early metallurgy from mono- to polymetallic within the fifth millennium bc.

The invention of ceramic objects made from fire-hardened clay represents an important and early step in the development of pyrotechnology. This paper examines pottery invention and innovation by hunter-gatherers in East Asia and by farmers in the Near East to examine how prehistoric communities in different socio-economic systems came to rely heavily on fired-clay containers. Drawing on advances in archaeological science, it examines from a comparative perspective early pottery's broader entanglements related to technology and use and argues that early pottery production by farmers in the Near East can be viewed as a process of innovation in a longer tradition of container technology, while the first hunter-gatherer pottery production in East Asia provides a better case for independent invention.

This paper discusses the invention of gold metallurgy within the Southeast European Chalcolithic on the basis of newly investigated gold objects from the Varna I cemetery (4550–4450 cal. bc). Comprehensive analyses, including preceding gold finds, shed new light not only on the technical expertise of the so far earliest known fine metalworkers, but also on the general context and potential prerequisites in which the invention of gold metallurgy may be embedded. Here, these structural trajectories as well as the unprecedented inventions connected to this early gold working will be highlighted in order to contextualize the apparently sudden appearance and rapid development of this new craft.

The invention and spread of lost-wax casting in South America is not amenable to explanations based on the concepts of practical or prestige technologies. Here we propose an alternative model to explain this phenomenon, based on a combination of technical analyses of Colombian metalwork and ethnographic information. A crucial element of our argument is that we should not focus on the cast objects or the casting process only, but rather we should consider the role of wax in this innovation. We develop the claim that the use of wax may have been culturally just as important as the metals, and that perhaps metals were used in a process of transformation that required the use of wax, as opposed to wax being simply the medium to make gold objects more beautiful. The focus on wax and its symbolic role may help explain both the invention and the adoption of the new technology, thus subsuming these two categories that those studying innovations tend to separate heuristically.

Distinctions between the concepts of ‘invention’ and ‘innovation’ are often confusing and ambiguous. Rarely, if ever, is invention the result of a lightening-strike ‘aha’ moment. Rather, invention tends to be the application of clever innovation from one aspect of life to another, shaped through personal observations and/or experiences. The ‘invention’ of metallurgy, for example, did not simply spring from the earth one morning, but rather evolved from observations of and experiences in other pyrotechnological processes. Past scholars have speculated on the invention of various early pyrotechnological activities, such as glass making and glaze production. What has not been fully explored, however, are the aspects of cross-craft interactions linking these and other pyrotechnologies. An example of this is the limited research exploring the technological connections between the advent and development of glass technologies and developments in metallurgical and other vitreous technologies. In this paper, these connections will be explored from pyrotechnological and craft technique perspectives. Ideas concerning connections between glass and non-ferrous metallurgy and glazing are discussed.