Taking Things Apart: Reconfiguring Production Practices in South India

Summary

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

In this paper I explore how taking apart the bundle of practices grouped together as ‘metallurgy’ might lead to a better understanding of not only that technology but also of ancient South Indian society. While cross-craft approaches to technologies allow archaeologists to explore potential relationships between production activities that otherwise might be investigated independently or in isolation, disaggregating the processes involved in any given craft can further their potential to illuminate past production practices. A focus on constituent practices—rather than on the bundle that constitutes each craft—draws our attention to how such practices might be present not only in varied crafts but also in other, non-craft, activities; to how such activities might reflect divergent, locally specific bundles of practices. This tracing of discrete components can be potentially useful in South India and especially regarding the development of local metallurgical productive activities. The archaeological landscape there presents evidence attesting to a range of production practices that do not easily fit those boundaries of craft production and technological development usually used by archaeologists. This mis-fit reveals a glimpse into a possible alternative crafting framework, perhaps one better suited to South India.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23080