Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings," at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This session purposefully expands the notion of crafting, excavating its entangled relationship to the production and maintenance of culture, while addressing its relationships to ancient subjectivity. Through multiple pathways, the papers in the session focus on contexts of production, placement, and affect, exploring the many ways in which archaeologists understand, analyze and interpret ideas of "making" and "production" in relation to materials, artifacts, bodies, and places, to name a few. Drawing from case studies that are both spatially and temporally diverse, the papers in this session illustrate the many approaches to things (human/nonhuman) taken by archaeologists, from embodiment to materiality and agency studies. These case studies allow us to juxtapose ontological and cognitive/behavioral approaches to understanding ancient crafting. At the core of these approaches is the desire to understand the many facets, standpoints, performances, feelings, and modalities of being that together inform cultures through the production/making/crafting of things. This session does not aim to bring a unified voice to the ways in which archaeologists link craft to culture; rather, it revels in the diversity of efforts utilized to answer those questions.