Session: #398

Content:

Over the past twenty years or so, there has been significant challenge to, if not outright refutation of, the notion that mobile societies do not participate in specialized craft activities. By linking craft production in mobile societies to neo-evolutionary implications or reducing ‘craft’ simply to a measure of complexity, i.e., social complexity or complex society, these studies have rightly established the presence and importance of craft activities in mobile societies, i.e., usually taken as pastoralist and/or hunter-gatherer. Rather than a collection of additional studies meant to do the same, this session seeks a more detailed, localized understanding of how and why materials are crafted in mobile communities in a more concentrated effort to move ‘mobile’ crafts beyond their role as essentialized stylistic markers of culture history. Thus, we desire to lay bare and engage with the spatial and temporal logics that help shape craft activities in mobile societies through alternative, but interrelated, lenses – tradition, practice, and community identity. As integral parts of tradition and practice, we include considerations that weave together body-material engagements that are passed down generation to generation and embedded in social memory and identity. The overall goal of the session is to produce richer, more nuanced accounts of crafting in mobile societies that will serve as exemplars for future archaeological and other disciplinary studies. We welcome scholars from within and outside of archaeology to participate in this session.

Session: #398

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