Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Craft Specialization in Traditional Societies

University Of Florida, Gainesville FL

Investigators

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation study investigates how changing historical conditions create different forms of craft specialization in nonhierarchical societies. Archaeologists have intensively studied craft specialization because it highlights the role of labor organization in broader social transformations. Specialists, typically defined as skilled persons that provision demands beyond their household, can be particularly critical in establishing interdependence between communities. Specialists require support from other social units to make their crafting economically viable, which binds participating communities into obligations of reciprocity and exchange. Archaeologists and other social scientists have thus typically expected specialization only among complex, hierarchical societies (e.g. states) with centralized political economies that can draw on pooled resources to support full-time craft production. However, there is evidence to suggest that specialized pottery production may have occurred in some nonhierarchical hunter-gatherer societies in the southeastern United States. What might create the need for specialization in the absence of statehood or centralized governance? This research addresses this question by investigating how specific historical circumstances call for the emergence of different types of craft specialists. The project focuses on two eras of critical social change in the pre-colonial southeastern United States and specifically combines a novel method for assessing potting skill with pottery sourcing techniques, such as Neutron Activation Analysis, Laser Ablation-Inductively Coupled Plasma-Mass Spectrometry, X-ray diffraction, and ceramic petrography, to evaluate hypotheses that help explain the emergence of specialized production under historical conditions corresponding to each time frame. Radiocarbon assays associated with pottery vessels will establish an objective chronology to assess major changes in the social organization of mortuary pottery production through time. This project uses religious specialization, skilled crafting linked to ritual leadership, as a hypothesis to investigate how the breakdown in earlier period civic-ceremonial centers potentially prompted greater reliance on ritual specialists. This project also introduces identity-based specialization, the use of specialized production to perpetuate identities, as a hypothesis to investigate how specialization was linked to the emergence of social competition and increasing settlement density. Participatory crafting, unskilled crafting by a general population, will serve as an alternative hypothesis to test against religious and identity-based specialization. By successfully grounding specialization within the historical conditions of each time frame, this project will generate a new form of knowledge about pottery production that urges social scientists to revisit long-held assumptions about social organization, labor, and exchange in nonhierarchical societies globally. This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.