Crafting Labor and Landscape

Summary

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

This paper revisits how landscape and mineral extraction have been contextualized in the third millennium BCE, Ganeshwar Jodhpura Cultural Complex (GJCC), Rajasthan, India. The GJCC has very specific formations of sites around resource-high regions particular to this landscape and time period that demonstrate a focus on copper production and indicate a high level of socio-cultural and political complexity. Site development is a controlled, planned and materially articulated strategy that requires community mobilization, craft specialization and placemaking, and intimate high levels of political, social and economic self-realization. These levels of control are negotiated by and through value placed on new forms of material culture that emerge from high levels of craftsmanship that provide specific forms of sociality to the members of the GJCC community. Rather than considering the landscape only as mise-en-scène and context, this paper will understand landscape as laboring alongside the human body. Investigating the affective response to the landscape, this paper tests the agentive properties of place in relation to ancient subjectivity. The discussion of belonging in relation to labor and its link to placemaking will be investigated in an effort to provide clarity around the question of an agentive and laboring landscape.

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): 22963