Abstract
It is proposed that individual motor-performance variability in the manufacture of artifacts may permit archaeologists to discover which artifacts were made by which specific prehistoric individuals; this, in turn, may provide a new approach to the description of various aspects of social organization, as well as increased understanding of one aspect of the nature of formal variability in artifacts. Experimental results employing ceramic and hand-writing data demonstrate the potential feasibility of the approach, although more research is needed before it can be used confidently with prehistoric data.