From Local to Regional Technological Landscapes – The Mobility of Aeginetan Potters

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.

This paper stems from a project entitled TRACT (TRAvelling Ceramic Technologies as markers of human mobility in the Aegean), funded through Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions, which aims to demonstrate that the informed and interdisciplinary study of ancient pottery can shed new light on past human mobility. Our focus is on potters from the island of Aegina, located close to Athens, in the Saronic Gulf , and their mobility along the Euboean Gulf, a convenient water passage to the north, at the end of the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1200 BC).

The macroscopic examination of pottery, focusing on morphological/stylistic and technological features, has been the starting point of our study and the basis for the identification of craftspeople mobility. The subsequent incorporation of ceramic petrology and elemental analysis of a selection of ancient pottery samples, in combination with geological prospection in the studied landscapes and replication experiments, and ethnographic work on modern potters’ mobility has contributed to the understanding of the entire technological phenomenon at various spatial scales and with a time perspective. In particular, in this paper we will explore the issue of adaptation of Aeginetan potting tradition to several ‘new’ landscapes along the coast of the Euboean Gulf.

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): 25486