Journal ArticleDOI
Materializing Identities: An African Perspective
Reads0
Chats0
TLDR
The authors compare African pottery techniques at a subcontinental level and see whether there are recurrent patterns in their distribution and whether these can be related to specific social boundaries or historical processes of group formation.Abstract:
Archaeological approaches to social boundaries are currently emphasizing the dynamic nature of processes thought which individuals construct, maintain, and negotiate their identity. Although the integration of such concepts has led to a more accurate reconstruction of past social boundaries, it has also revealed a need for more sophisticated ways of interpreting material culture. This paper is a step in that direction. Focusing on pottery chaines operatoires and addressing questions about the salience and scale of particular behaviors, I seek to develop general propositions regarding the relationships between technological styles and aspects of social identity. To that end, I compare African pottery techniques at a subcontinental level and see whether there are recurrent patterns in their distribution and whether these can be related to specific social boundaries or historical processes of group formation.read more
Citations
More filters
Journal ArticleDOI
The Use of Ethnoarchaeology for the Archaeological Study of Ceramic Production
TL;DR: This article lay out the central questions addressed by archaeologists studying craft production, discuss how ethnoarchaeology has contributed to our understanding of ancient production systems, and suggest avenues of further research that can benefit archaeological investigation of the organization of ceramic production.
Journal ArticleDOI
Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies
Edward Schortman,Patricia Urban +1 more
TL;DR: The authors highlights general interpretive trends that underlie and structure current debates and offers suggestions for how studies of relations among crafts, power, and social heterogeneity might be pursued profitably in the future.
Journal ArticleDOI
A Dynamic Systems Framework for Studying Technological Change: Application to the Emergence of the Potter's Wheel in the Southern Levant
TL;DR: The dynamic systems framework as discussed by the authors is an alternative to traditional approaches that study technological change, and the benefits of this framework are simultaneously methodological and metaphorical: Methodologically, the framework provides a coherent analytic process for studying empirical data to explain the complexity of technological change.
A Dynamic Systems Framework for Studying Technological Change
TL;DR: Applicability of the dynamic systems framework for studying technological change is illustrated with an archaeological case study: the emergence of the potter's wheel in southern Levant during the 4th millennium BC.
Journal ArticleDOI
Current Issues in Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology
TL;DR: The last decade has seen a surge in ceramic ethnoarchaeological studies worldwide, covering such important topics as ceramic production, technological change, ceramic use and distribution, and social boundaries.
References
More filters
BookDOI
The social life of things: commodities in cultural perspective
TL;DR: Farriss and Reddy as discussed by the authors presented a cultural biography of things: commoditization as process Igor Kopytoff Part II, and two kinds of value in the Eastern Solomon Islands William H. Davenport and William M. Cassanelli Part V.
Posted Content
The Social Life of Things
TL;DR: The authors examine how things are sold and traded in a variety of social and cultural settings, both present and past, focusing on culturally defined aspects of exchange and socially regulated processes of circulation, illuminate the ways in which people find value in things and things give value to social relations.
Journal ArticleDOI
The cultural biography of objects
Chris Gosden,Yvonne Marshall +1 more
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors present a cultural biography of objects, which is a collection of objects related to the objects they study. But they do not discuss the relationships between objects.
Book
The Archaeology of Ethnicity: Constructing Identities in the Past and Present
TL;DR: Sian Jones as mentioned in this paper argues for a fundamentally different view of ethnicity, as a complex dynamic form of identification, requiring radical changes in archaeological analysis and interpretation, and presents a comprehensive and critical synthesis of recent theories of ethnicity in the human sciences.