Publisher Summary
This chapter discusses the Bronze Age. In about 1800 B.C, England was again invaded in successive waves by a powerful people known to archaeologists as the Beaker folk. The newcomers, in contrast to their predecessors buried their dead severally; sometimes, in flat graves but more often under the large mounds of earth many of which still stud the countryside. Although, the Beaker folk in Britain did not produce bronze and their culture constituted a transitional phase, it is with these people that the dawn of the Bronze Age in this country is associated. All these early people appear to have coalesced and settled down to a long and relatively peaceful period of development. Cremation became the fashionable mode of burial, and a native bronze industry, characterized by a developed form of axe known as a palstave, with rapiers and looped spearheads, came into being. Later, more invaders arrived and are recognized by their collective cremation cemeteries or Urnfields, and further bronze refinements such as the leaf-shaped sword and socketed axe. Evidence of the occupation in South Buckinghamshire during the Middle and the late phases of the Bronze Age are more plentiful and indicate occupation of the Wye valley in the neighbourhood of High Wycombe.

The bronze age

The aim of Artefacts as Categories is to ask what we can learn about a society from the variability of the objects it produces. Dr Miller presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery produced in a single village in central India, drawing together and analysing a whole range of aspects - technology, function, design, symbolism and ideology - that are usually studied separately. Central to the analysis is the contention that human categorisation processes mediate in the production of all artefacts and that artefacts therefore constitute an essential and much-neglected 'silent' source of evidence which complements the abundant studies of linguistic categories. Using the concepts of 'pragmatics', 'framing', and 'ideology', the author points to the insufficiency of many ethnographic accounts of symbolism and underlines the need to consider both the social positioning of the interpreter and the context of the interpretation when looking at artefacts.

Artefacts as Categories: A Study of Ceramic Variability in Central India.

Technology Matters: Questions to Live with

Learning in the circumstances of practice stands as the commonest and most enduring way occupational capacities have been learnt across human history, and, likely, are currently learnt. Yet, a comp...

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Learning in the circumstances of practice

This article proposes that human resource development (HRD) practitioners need to reconsider the potential of workers’ learning through every activities and interactions at work. It holds that the majority of learning across working lives likely occurs outside of being mentored, taught, or guided through training programs by others (e.g., teachers or experienced coworkers etc.) and their predetermined intentions for what is to be learnt. Yet, many, and perhaps most, explanatory and procedural accounts emphasize these kinds of intentional interventions by others (e.g., educational and training programs), more than workers’ actions as learners in and through their everyday work activities and interactions. Therefore, it seems important for HRD that these everyday learning processes be understood more fully. Here, an account is advanced of how workers’ learning through everyday work activities and interactions, both remote from and when engaged with others, arises through mimetic processes (i.e., observation...

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Mimesis: Learning Through Everyday Activities and Interactions at Work

It is only in the recent decade that distinct archaeological studies on children have emerged. One of the ways in which children have been made archaeologically visible has been in the context of craft and learning frameworks where they have been perceived as active agents in the production of material culture. Archaeologically, the work of novice crafters can be discerned through attributes of small size, asymmetrical forms, and other deficiencies in manufacturing techniques suggesting inadequate conceptual frames as well as less developed physical skills. The deposits recovered during the excavations in the northwestern part of the ancient site of Indor Khera have been dated between 200 b.c. and a.d. 300. The excavations have revealed in an early phase a potter's house within and around which several miniature vessels with similar characteristics were found, perhaps the work of children. Further, numerous tiny terracotta and clay lumps indicate that to begin children might have been given small bits of clay to play with. It appears that the ceramic craft may have involved a gradual learning process that included play, observation, and experimentation.

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Children Playing and Learning: Crafting Ceramics in Ancient Indor Khera

Archaeologists study craft production as it provides information on the ways in which artifacts were produced. Craft specialization is, however, more complicated as it involves not only techniques but also organization. In contrast to anthropology where observation can reveal the scale of production or the amount of resources or time utilized for the practise of a craft, archaeology can make only tentative interpretations. Scale of production, standardization, and levels of expertise can be understood when certain variables are known. Archaeology is a discipline that understands the past in the context of the present and thus often uses the methods of production and the function of present-day artefacts to interpret ancient artefacts. However, there is also a tendency to use present-day organizational systems to understand past production mechanisms. This may be problematic especially where past systems varied greatly from modern ones. The particular socioeconomic background of past systems must account f...

Archaeological Problems with Specialization

In South Asia, local communities most often live near or amidst archaeological places. Their lives are in many ways framed and structured by these places. At the same time, these places too are imp...

Archaeological places: Negotiations between local communities, archaeologists and the state in India:

This ethnoarchaeological study, carried out in the Upper Ganga Plains of North India, contributes to our understanding of the variation that exists in the organization of household ceramic production. The paper describes techniques, tools and facilities; division of work/tasks; location of production; range of products; differences in the scale and intensity of production between rural and urban households; and interweaves the archaeological implications in relation to the locus of production, scale, intensity and specialization.

Households at Work: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Variation in Ceramic Production in North India

The Bronze Age was a period when the notion of ‘frontiers’ was fluid and contacts were wide ranging. In a situation of considerable movements of people and objects, what probably also travelled were technologies. This article looks at different drilling technologies in the Bronze Age from Egypt to the Indian subcontinent. The adoption or rejection of different types of drilling mechanisms in different regions reminds us that technologies have to be socially acceptable in the first place before they could be adopted.

Jaya Menon

Papers

Children Playing and Learning: Crafting Ceramics in Ancient Indor Khera

Archaeological Problems with Specialization

Archaeological places: Negotiations between local communities, archaeologists and the state in India:

Households at Work: An Ethnoarchaeological Study of Variation in Ceramic Production in North India

The transmission of craft technologies in the Bronze Age