So Many Bowls… but in Which Sense?
In the archaeological literature of Late Chalcolithic South-West Asia, the concept of mass production has played a key role as the pivot of a long-standing broadly consensual argument. This sort of clichéd postulate on the appearance of so-called social complexity put together repetitiveness of prod...
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| Publicado no: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/paleorient, |
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| Autor principal: | |
| Formato: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Idioma: | Anglais |
| Publicado em: |
Paléorient
2025
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| Assuntos: | |
| Acesso em linha: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Resumo: | In the archaeological literature of Late Chalcolithic South-West Asia, the concept of mass production has played a key role as the pivot of a long-standing broadly consensual argument. This sort of clichéd postulate on the appearance of so-called social complexity put together repetitiveness of production, standardisation of finished products, increasing craft specialization, and, both as the outcome and the driving force of all these phenomena, the advent of urbanisation and early states. This perspective associates mass production with serial production on a terminological level, without making any distinction on a conceptual, operational, or material-cultural basis. This paper aims to identify criteria to differentiate serial from mass production by analysing various types of late prehistoric Mesopotamian ceramic containers, especially 5th millennium Coba Bowls (CBs) and 4th millennium BCE Bevelled-Rim Bowls (BRB) from Syrian sites and ongoing excavations in Iraqi Kurdistan. The aim is to characterise serial and mass operational sequences as separate modes of production implying different relationships—both in terms of rates and patterns—with the phenomena of standardisation and specialisation. |
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