Session: #688

Session, made up of a combination of papers, max. 15 minutes each

Richard Sennett describes the craftsman as “a balanced union of manual and mental skills connected in a continuous dialogue”. If, on the one hand, this model does not properly explain the variety of behaviours characterising ancient producers, at the same time it makes clear how the production of objects is not just a mechanical sequence of practical gestures.
Recently, the study of skills and learning processes in archaeology availed of sociology, psychology and neuroscience based theories providing a complex framework of biological and psychological variables affecting the development of practical skills and knowledge in artefacts production.
Learning theories suggest how routine plays a key role in the embodiment of gestures and technical sequence and how the knowledge, partly acquired by experience, is the aspect leading to produce not just a functional object but a high-quality product.
Currently, the application of multidisciplinary approaches to the analysis of material culture permits defining the whole sequence of production from raw material procurement to its processing in a final product. With these premises the proposed session aims to discuss the concept of skills and its patterns of identification in the archaeological record through representative case studies from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age.
A comparison of different points of view concerning this issue will lead to trace a scenario in which to compare figures of producers characterised by different level of skills and discuss behavioural patterns according to the archaeological evidences and interpretative models for a better understanding of these aspects of material culture.

skills, learning, knowledge, craftsman, prehistory

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Dr Vanessa Forte (United Kingdom) ¹

Andrea Zupancich (Italy) ²