Creativity in the Bronze Age. Understanding Innovation in Pottery, Textile, and Metalwork Production

Abstract

This collaboratively written volume (Lise Bender Jørgensen, Joanna Sofaer, and Marie Louise Stig Sørensen, with contributions by Grahame Appleby, SebastianBecker, SophieBergerbrant, SarahCoxon, Sølvi Helene Fossøy, Karina Grömer, Flemming Kaul, Darko Maricevic, Sanjin Mihelic, Antoinette Rast-Eicher, and Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer) explores the nature of creativity during the European Bronze Age by looking at developments in three significant categories of objects: pottery, textiles and metalwork. The volume introduces a series of innovative themes focusing on aspects of materiality, aesthetics, training and learning, cosmology, and technological change and innovation. The importance and interest of the topic are very broad. The discipline of archaeology is in these years fuelled by more archaeological data, by new stimulating theories, and by newmethods from the natural sciences to explore the archaeological items. However, these developments are often compartmentalised within each find category, and are rarely related to each other in scholarly discussions. It is to the volume’s great merit that it combines the categories pottery, metalwork and textiles in such a comprehensive way that the reader can truly see the developments and communalities across crafts. The overall design, structure and organization strongly strengthens the cross-disciplinarity of the entire research project, and makes the volume an extremely stimulating read. It is divided into three parts. Each part consists of an individual or coauthored papers on very specific case studies or topics of textiles, pottery or metalwork, and in each part, the three main authors first introduce the theme and conclude by reflections. In Part I: Raw materials: Creativity and the Properties ofMaterials, archaeological investigations are combined with new analytical methods from the natural sciences; Part II: Production Practices draws in research from experimental archaeology and from social anthropology;Part III: Effects: Shape,Motifs, Pattern, Colour, and Texture, highlights and discusses specific features such as certain recurring motifs and their potential cosmological meaning, or decorative effects and their technical explanations. The research in this anthology stems from a HERA project, awarded by the Creative Europe of the EUCommission in a highly competitive international call and peer-reviewed by experts. This is also a great quality of the book, because it does not simply rely on an occasional collaboration or a conference; the authors have worked together in a shared project for several years and this has matured the book and its conclusions considerably, and has resulted in a concise and coherent work. The achievement of the volume is that it has truly embedded interdisciplinarity in the structure of the book, in each chapter, even into the introduction of each section. It appears as a text written conjointly, by the three editors and the many expert authors in a continual dialogue and discussion. In too many collaborative projects, the intentions are to share knowledge and work across disciplines, but in the final publication, each scholar writes his/her own chapter. This is not the case here. Even in the single-authored chapters, there is a strong effort to incorporate results and ideas in the overall scope of understanding creativity in all three fields, and not just in terms of similarities and differences. This consistent integration becomes very impressive indeed in, for example, the chapter (p. 275–284) onLitzenkeramik, co-authored by experts on pottery and textiles (Joanna Sofaer, Sarah Coxon, Karina Grömer, Sanjin Mihelic). They investigate how this