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Showing posts from May, 2020

Can progress come about without individualization?

The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain \ Published on Mediim's Data Driven Investor as Were Itinerant Craftsmen Free Agents During the Bronze Age and Why Does it Matter? The middle sector is the artist’s focal point in this sculpture from the Bronze Age, raised from below and burdened from above -  Public Domain Prior to the 1930’s when Australian archaeologist, V Gordon Childe, presented his theory about the metal smiths of the Bronze Age and their concomitant relationship to the power elite, archaeologists considered craft making merely as a result of economics. Childe identified the powerful role that prestige goods played in the early development of craft specialization and connected the emergence of craft specialists with an itinerant metallurgist culture in prehistoric Europe. A debate emerged around the social and political role that specialized craft prod

Were Bronze Age Specialized Makers, Freemen or Slaves?

Centralization vs Decentralization in the Bronze Age In 2004 anthropologist 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 unravelling 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. Sumerian Votive Figure Ancient Mesopotamia   Public Domain Dedication (CC0) Before the 1930's when  V. Gordon Childe’ began investi