Agency and Structure in Shipbuilding: Shipwrecks, Operational Process, Practice, and Social Learning Perspectives

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Paper / Report Submission (General Sessions)" , at the 2022 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Throughout the development of nautical archaeology, the debate about defining terminology of individual ship timbers, how each ship was originally conceptualized, and when and why changes in construction methodology took place continue with the discipline. Over the last three decades, archaeologists Patrice Pomey and Eric Rieth adopted the established terminology and applied it with the operational process as a lexicon, methodology, and analytic tool for others to follow. Originally introduced for lithic analysis, the operational process reconstructs the techniques chronologically used to create an artifact, both from a mechanical and social perspective. While Pomey and Rieth have felt the operational process as adequate for their purposes, the authors wish to incorporate practice and social learning theories to explain the social context, actions, and cognition of shipbuilding. This paper is an introduction of these anthropological theories to ship construction and comparing it with other well-known examples of artifact manufacture.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SHA 2022 General Sessions   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2022

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology