Crafting in the World

This volume expands understandings of crafting practices, which in the past was the major relational interaction between the social agency of materials, technology, and people, in co-creating an emergent ever-changing world. The chapters discuss different ways that crafting in the present is useful in understanding crafting experiences and methods in the past, including experiments to reproduce ancient excavated objects, historical accounts of crafting methods and experiences, craft revivals, and teaching historical crafts at museums and schools. 

Crafting in the World is unique in the diversity of its theoretical and multidisciplinary approaches to researching crafting, not just as a set of techniques for producing functional objects, but as social practices and technical choices embodying cultural ideas, knowledge, and multiple interwoven social networks. Crafting expresses and constitutes mental schemas, identities, ideologies, and cultures. The multiple meanings and significances of crafting are explored from a great variety of disciplinary perspectives, including anthropology, archaeology, sociology, education, psychology, women’s studies, and ethnic studies.

This book provides a deep temporal range and a global geographical scope, with case studies ranging from Europe, Africa, and Asia to the Americas and a global internet website for selling home crafted items.

​Clare T. Burke is an archaeologist specialising in the study and scientific analysis of ceramic material culture. Her PhD at the University of Sheffield focused on the chaîne opératoire and habitus as conceptual frameworks for understanding past crafting practices in relation to the production of Early Bronze Age ceramics from mainland Greece. She currently works at the Institute for Oriental and European Archaeology of the Austrian Academy of Sciences in Vienna investigating prehistoric ceramics.
Suzanne M. Spencer-Wood is a Professor of Anthropology at Oakland University and an Associate of the Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology at Harvard University. She organized and chaired the first two conference symposia on gender research in historical archaeology at the 1989 Conference on Historical and Underwater Archaeology in the First Joint Archaeological Congress in Baltimore, and at the 1989 Chacmool Conference in Calgary, Canada (proceedings published 1991). Professor Spencer-Wood’s early feminist theorizing was also published in the 1992 Southern Illinois University Conference volume. She subsequently wrote feminist articles published in Historical Archaeology and the International Journal of Historical Archaeology, as well as book chapters, including those in volumes she edited for Springer, entitled The Archaeology and Preservation of Gendered Landscapes (co-edited with Sherene Baugher), and Historical and Archaeological Perspectives on Gender Transformations: From Private to Public.