Exploring craft spaces: A new insight into the archaeology of pottery production

The theoretical and methodological framework for studying craft spaces remains significantly underdeveloped compared with other types of functional areas, such as domestic, religious, and political spaces, which have been extensively documented across various regions and time periods. Specifically, pottery production has usually been studied from a top-down oriented approach, in the frame of political economy. This perspective contributed to a general lack of scholarly focus and field documentation of production areas. It reflects a paradigmatic issue regarding the perceived informational value of these areas. The core challenge, and at the same time the key motivation, of developing an archaeology of artisanal spaces lies in the absence of a universally accepted definition of the “potter’s workshop” (Costin, 2020). Scholars focusing across diverse cultural contexts often employ distinct terminologies and conceptual frameworks to interpret workshop remains. This special issue seeks to bring together different chrono-cultural perspectives and to propose fresh research directions and interpretation on pottery craft spaces. Some of the papers in this special issue were presented at the international workshop organised on 9 December 2022 at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne by C. Padovani, J. Flahaut and S. Willems (https://archeorient.hypotheses.org/29294).

The objective of this special issue is to expand on the groundwork laid by previous researchers (Duistermaat, 2008; Hasaki, 2011; Denti and Villette, 2019) in studying pottery craft spaces – not merely as contexts for interpretation but as meaningful socio-cultural elements for understanding ancient societies. Each element of the potter’s workshops provides information on the techniques and labour organisation of each potter and their group, as well as on the deeper socio-economic structure of their society.