Transferable Skills: Crafts and Knowledge Transmission in the Ancient Caribbean

Summary

This is an abstract from the "The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, we examine the development of craftsmanship and knowledge transmission in the pre-colonial and early colonial Caribbean. By adopting a chaîne opératoire approach to different crafts, we aim to investigate processes of circulation of materials and knowledge between different social groups. We focus on multiple scales of interaction through time, as illustrated by 1) the exchange of exotic gemstone ornaments across the eastern Caribbean (ca. AD 0-400), 2) the production and circulation of ground stone celts on the northwest of the Dominican Republic (AD 1200-1500), and 3) the development of transcultural ceramics from one of the first large Spanish settlements of the New World (Dominican Republic, AD 1492-1562). Combined with ethnographic and ethnohistoric sources, this approach allows us to evaluate possible social mechanisms responsible for raw material, typo-technological, and skill variability in these artefact repertoires.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• The Movement of Technical Knowledge: Cross-Craft Perspectives on Mobility and Knowledge in Production Technologies   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23300