The passage suggests that the early shops for making tools were ______.

A
解析：本题的依据句是“At first，these articles were whittled with a knife，but when pioneer craftsmen set up their primitive shops most of them were fashioned on a lathe--a machine which holds an object and rotates it while it is being shaped by a tool.”在这里，A选项的not very sophisticated 意思为“并不复杂，是简单的”，对应原文中的primitive(原始的，简单的)。其他选项的内容属于无关信息。