Archeologists Look At Bronze Age Craft Production in a New Light

Looking beyond the economic realm and examining the sociopolitical role played by specialized craft production

Bronze Shepard Ancient Greece Metropolitan Museum of Art Public Domain Dedication (CC0)

First published on Medium·May 7, 2020

Centralization vs Decentralization in the Bronze Age

In 2004 anthropologists Edward M. Schortman and Patricia Urban published Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies, a research paper discussing trends in an active archeology debate over the role of craft production during the Bronze Age.

Modeling the Roles of Craft Production in Ancient Political Economies is an interesting read, particularly because it likewise describes contemporary social organization, or perhaps, better said, what was contemporary, yesterday, but is now rapidly unraveling and no one yet knows where it is going.

Contrasts between the centrally managed Sumerian culture and a European egalitarian class of itinerant makers can be applied to contemporary political organization, vulnerable to change, in a world responding to coronavirus.

Before the 1930s when V. Gordon Ch…