Ethnoarchaeology and ethnoanalogical sources as a whole are crucial for the generation of interpretations in prehistory in general, and particularly in lithic functional analysis. These sources inform about the use of certain tools, operative chains and full technical processes, or about the different contexts in which production is carried out. Thus, we can obtain insights on the use and management of tools, production objectives, product management, the existence of other tasks or stages that are involved and/or avoided, the know-how displayed, the user’s gender, age and skill, access or ownership of the tools, the reasons for division of labour, social conditions of the workers, the working area, seasonality, socio-economic context, the ideological, symbolic or narrative aspect of the technical activity, and so on. Ethnoarchaeological sources, however, present some limitations, which means they must be used with a critical perspective. No pristine references exist and it is risky to make direct inferences. These sources should be used in strategies to enrich the construction of hypotheses and the interpretation of results. The aim is not only to find an ethnographic analogue for an archaeological functional inference, but also an analogical framework in which similarities and differences are equally important and expressive.

This paper is a contribution fonning a part of the HAR2011-29486 and HAR2010-21545-C02--019 projects ofthe MlCINN, Proyectos de Investigación Fundamental no Orientada Program. The authors are grateful to Peter Smith for the English translation.

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