Invented, Adopted, Shared, Acquired, Inspired? Technological Change and the Talc-Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition

Author(s): Heather Miller

Year: 2015

Summary

A bewildering assortment of materials utilizing siliceous pastes were used to make small objects such as figures, beads and containers, in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Mediterranean, and regions beyond and between. From very early beginnings in the sixth millennium BCE or earlier in some regions, the assortment of these materials reached great diversity of production technique and material in the third and second millennia BCE, with much less diversity of appearance. In places where these materials have seen more analytical study, such as Egypt and the Indus Valley, similarities but also striking differences occur in the regional assortments of materials and techniques employed to produce quite similar appearing materials, used to make objects clearly belonging to the local corpus of style and topic. What was involved in the spread of these materials and their manufacture? Can we find clues to the social process involved in the innovative development of these materials from analysis of the objects and their production? In this paper, I particularly address the third question posed for this session: how does the spread of technology across significant social, cultural and geographic boundaries differ from the spread of technology within social groups?

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Cite this Record

Invented, Adopted, Shared, Acquired, Inspired? Technological Change and the Talc-Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition. Heather Miller. Presented at The 80th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, San Francisco, California. 2015 ( tDAR id: 396405)

Keywords

Geographic Keywords
South Asia

Spatial Coverage

min long: 59.678; min lat: 4.916 ; max long: 92.197; max lat: 37.3 ;