Bradley and Edmonds (1993: 5-17) begin with a useful critique of the formal approaches to exchange first articulated in the work of Renfrew and his colleagues. In reviewing prior approaches, Bradley and Edmonds perceive weaknesses and untenable assumptions in the links asserted by prior researchers connecting (1) efficiency in reduction strategies, organization of production, and degree of hierarchy in social organization (Torrence, Ericson, others), and (2) geographical distributions of types of artifacts with the nature of social organization (Renfrew et al.).

Bradley and Edmonds emerge with a strategy that permits them to connect temporal change in quarrying and the organization of reduction in the immediate vicinity of the source with perceived changes in knapping strategies. They also explicitly attempt to incorporate evidence from social and symbolic constraints on quarries, where historical specifics about specialization, quarry access, and socio-political boundaries appear to trump the larger patterns of circulation documented during the 1970s by Renfrew, Hodder, and others (Bradley and Edmonds 1993: 9, 63). Further, the authors observe that while these social and symbolic control variables are extremely difficult to appraise from archaeological evidence, these unknowns were ultimately some of the most important variables informing Torrence's (1986) formal approach to efficiency and socio-economic control of production. On these grounds, Bradley and Edmonds devote more effort to methodological and theoretical goals that they feel are attainable: documenting variability in production, inferring connections with regional consumption evidence through temporal context, and exploring social and symbolic generalities through ethnographic analogy from quarries and with evidence of regional ground axe distributions in Britain.