Salutary Failures: Bronze Age Metallurgists in China and Their Faulty Seams

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Creativity and imagination are subjects which do not often appear in the archaeology of craft. Though archaeologists study innovation in relation to a craft’s technological developments and discoveries, we approach such novelties as progress bound rather than creative pursuits. Craft workers are, after all, toiling for other people in exchange for their basic means of existence. This paper addresses the problem of creativity in archaeology and argues that making and imagination are not antagonistic and does not have to presuppose an opposition between mind and hand. Focusing on Bronze Age metalworkers from the Dian polity in Southwest China, this paper examines how mistakes and breakdowns in casting may provide a basis for understanding creativity in craftwork. Failures-in-making not only reflect individual differences in skill and learning. They can also demonstrate how "type forms," or generic categories of objects, are only viable things insofar as their makers commit themselves to taking some direction of action. The paper asks more generally how mistakes co-create a craft person’s understanding of standard and judgement.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Crafting Culture: Thingselves, Contexts, Meanings

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24386