Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Communities of Practice in the Ancient Andes: Thinking through Knowledge Transmission and Community Making in and beyond Craft Production" at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The term “Communities of Practice” (CoPs) has been applied to craft production to describe the sharing, learning, and materialization of specialized knowledge in a localized and intimate context. Beyond craft production, CoPs can also offer a new approach to thinking about knowledge transmission between individuals and groups; for example, in ritual practice, subsistence technologies, mnemonics, etc. This symposium challenges its participants to explore this framework to identify and evaluate CoPs in the ancient Andes. What social, political, economic, ecological, or ideological circumstances allowed for the creation and maintenance of CoPs? What evidence or material markers can we use to understand CoPs in the Andean world? How did CoPs share knowledge across distant places and generations? Papers presented here span all periods and regions of the Andes and encompass topics such as craft production, gendered practices, ritual, architecture, bioarchaeology, food production and cuisine, and iconography.