Research on craft specialization has shifted from trying to determine if it is present or absent in a particular society at some point in its history to understanding its nature and role in a given context. The two research areas that have received the most attention are political economy and social identity.
Political Economy
Archaeologists interested in the study of political economy are trying to understand how economic processes, including those of production and exchange, provide support for the differential distribution of power and authority that characterize chiefdoms or middle-range societies and states. Given their focus on prehistoric societies and early civilization, archaeologists interested in these issues are often working within the context of preindustrial or noncapitalist social formations. This requires them to develop models that do not assume the same sorts of economic relations, systems of value, or modes of production as found in the modern world. The preindustrial, noncapitalist state societies that developed in both the Old and New Worlds often continued to rely on modes of production that did not develop into the sort of full-time paid occupational specialization envisioned by Childe. In particular, production in the spatial location and social context of the household remains a primary way of organizing production. Even many attached craft specialists continue to structure the creation of goods and the training of new producers through a familial or household context even when supported by the state or elite patrons.
Much of the terminology discussed earlier was developed by archaeologists interested in questions of political economy. Emerging complex societies benefited from already existing systems of craft production and specialization which helped underwrite the changes they experienced. Attached and independent specialists, when they coexist in society, are devoted to the production of different kinds of objects or materials. Attached specialists are assumed to be responsible for prestige goods that are restricted in their distribution to members of the elite and function as symbolic markers of status and political power. Independent specialists, in contrast, produce more everyday sorts of items needed by people at all levels of society. This difference requires more than one way of exchanging goods and services. Prestige goods are controlled by social and political elites who use them to create alliances, bind subordinates to them, and to make visible their claims to distinction and status. They are not available to just anyone and their use is restricted by social and possibly legal sanctions.
The existence of attached specialization is seen as crucial although there is less interest in the specialists themselves and more in how their patrons deploy the prestige goods produced. The relationship between specialist and patron provides the patrons with material goods that serve as economic and symbolic capital in the ongoing negotiation of social position and political control with other members of the elite. The ability to control such goods has in fact been seen as one explanation for the emergence of social hierarchy and complexity. Thus, Childe’s original idea that specialization develops after the establishment of cities and state-level government has been reversed. Craft specialization becomes a cause, not a consequence.
Goods produced by independent producers, defined as utilitarian, are distributed through less restrictive systems of exchange such as marketplaces. Anyone may obtain such items if they have the necessary means. The association between independent producers and utilitarian goods has emerged as less satisfactory than the equation of attached specialists and prestige goods (see Economic Archaeology). This is because material goods of all sorts may be used as markers of social difference, identity, and affiliation, even ones that seem to be merely tools or utensils for daily life. Nonelite households at the small third millennium BC site of Kurban HciyUk (Turkey) acquired large flint blades and wheel-made pottery from specialists while continuing to produce other kinds of stone tools and make some pottery vessels by hand. The types of goods produced by specialists that were found in Kurban domestic contexts suggest that people living in this small town were not only part of a diversified regional economy but also used these goods as items of social display. Wheel-made ceramics were used for serving food which would increase their social visibility and thus their use as conveyers of social and symbolic information. The ability to manipulate such social symbols was as important to the nonelite households operating at the small scale of the domestic setting as it was to the elite.
Social Identity
Although research on political economy has dominated discussions of craft specialization, another focus is the study of social identity. This research is more concerned with the specialists themselves, not as the means by which others become prominent and important but as people with social positions and roles. It seeks to determine how being involved in some sort of specialized craft production becomes one source of individual or group identity. Since not all people will produce the same things, one avenue to explore is how productive activities are allocated and how new craftspeople are recruited, trained, and supported. Certain forms of knowledge and productive activities may be widespread, other kinds of production may be the province of adult men or women, particular ethnic groups or social classes, guilds, slaves, or other subgroups within society. The consequences of being part of an system of independent or attached production for the producers themselves have also been studied. Producers of similar items may have quite different social status depending on the particular circumstances. In contrast to the Ur III example, weavers in the Vijayanagara empire (that dominated south India during the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries AD) experienced an increase in status over time. Weavers were independent specialists organized by households or communities, not slaves or semi-free individuals as in the case of Mesopotamia.
The assumption that producers are inherently of lower social status or belong to a lower social class than the patrons to whom they are attached and would thus be excluded from use of the very things they make has been challenged by consideration of social identity. Even when independent specialists are believed to exist, they are generally taken to be different from those who rule or make up the social elite. Some archaeologists have demonstrated that in fact members of the elite or the ruling class may indeed also be craft producers. Although their support may not derive primarily from their productive activities, they are generally producing more than they need for their own purposes. This makes it possible to think of them as a kind of craft specialist whose social position becomes part of how their work is valued by society. Their existence has been demonstrated among the pre-Columbian Maya of Mesoamerica and the Native American groups of the northwest coast of the United States, including Alaska, and Canada. Research on craft production in other Native American societies demonstrates that often the producer and user of symbolically significant objects are the same person. Ritual specialists make their own paraphernalia as part of their religious role in society, a role that onfers social status on those who fill it. These investigations indicate that the production of material symbols of prestige may take different forms. Acquiring control over the labor of others and over what they produce is one form but by no means the only one.
Social identity shifts the focus from attached or independent specialists as hard and fast categories to demonstrate how the same producers may fill multiple roles. Ironworkers in the Toro kingdom of Uganda might be both part-time independent producers in the context of their village and also specialists supported by the Toro ruler at the royal court, moving between these roles and locations as needed. By directing attention to questions of identity, archaeologists do not limit themselves to the study of a select few in society. They are able to bring in issues of gender and ethnicity as well as taking a more inclusive approach to the study of social status or class. In the process, the interconnections between cultural values and economic relations have come into sharper focus. At the same time, the complexity of these interconnections in any given social context become easier to see as well as how those connections changed over time. The topic of identity has also proved useful in studying specialization in less stratified or centralized societies but has also augmented political economic studies of chiefdoms and states.
World History
