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Almost from its inception, archaeology has been deeply concerned with the human relationship with technology. It has long been recognised that control over technology and the means of production are important in the maintenance of power systems, and that symbolic factors can be significant in the trajectory of technological systems. In the past 20–30 years, agency and technological choice have also been emphasised. Harnessing the potential social powers of technology can be achieved through control over – or restriction of access to – technological knowledge and skill, resources, and infrastructure, and, often implicitly, through the maintenance and performance of social norms. Moments of technological change – a frequent focus of archaeological studies – may expose these structures at the very point at which they are most rapidly changing form, creating interpretive challenges that require robust theorisation.
In response, this issue on Technology and Power forefronts a range of papers that explore how recent theoretical and methodological developments in archaeology can shed new light on our understanding of the relationship between technology, and different types of power. The papers in this Special Issue range widely, with consideration of ceramic production nearly 4000 years ago in central Eurasia, to gold-working in China c. 400–300 BCE and hydraulic innovations in Ebro river valley, Catalonia c. 1100 CE. In this way the issue explores technology across time and place and at micro- and macro-scales. A strong connecting theme across all papers is the relationship between technological and socio-political transformations. Whether authors are exploring ceramic production, precious metal working, or hydraulic technologies, each contribution offers a nuanced understanding of the contingency of power on technological developments and the ways in which different groups harness new technologies to convey status, to manipulate visual grammar or to intensify exploitation. The papers in this issue also deconstruct, in different ways, established notions of relationships between political power and technology in terms of hierarchical, vertical relations. Frieman and James explore the power of peripheries and creolising processes as generators of creativity in terms of technologies, while Dolfini focuses on Copper Age Italy and challenges the normative interpretation that weapon-rich graves, with metal objects, represent the warrior elite. There are gaps of course, the important role of experimental archaeology and replication in discussions of early technology and power is not a strong feature of this issue and authors touch only tangentially on the potential for research on technology to contribute to understanding economic development and advancement. As a collection, however, these papers offer a strong emphasis on the societal and social inter-relationships with technology. Together they demand a fresh consideration of how technologies can themselves drive changes in power relations by offering opportunities for innovation and adaption, while recognising that the human relationship with technology is iterative, flexible and multi-dimensional. In so doing, they acknowledge that technological change is not simply a passive response to social concerns, while avoiding a return to the pitfalls of technological determinism.
Collective technologies
A common theme here is the power of collective innovation and management of technology. In a challenge to more normative ideas that frame technological innovation as contingent on elite desires and patronage, several papers focus on the ways in which communities of practice can promote horizontal power relations. This is most clearly elucidated by Fragnoli and Frangipane’s expansive account of ceramic production in SE Anatolia, focused on the tell site of Arslantepe in the 4th to 3rd millennia BCE. They reflect on the ways in which a centralisation of resources for production over time match a shift to more segregated potting practices. Ceramic production moved from something broadly distributed in the community to an activity in the hands of more specialised craftworkers producing for the extended populace. Further changes, however, prompted by a shift in supply strategies, resulted in a greater standardisation in finishing and firing, suggesting that producers were aiming for specific functional and aesthetic results. A community of practice is envisaged which allowed practitioners to share knowledge and expertise in honing and refining ceramic production separate from any central influences or institutions. Indeed, traditions of production were maintained even following the disappearance of centralised power in early Bronze Age Arslantepe.
A different take on distributed production is offered in a detailed exploration of textile production in ancient Greece. Dimova, Harris and Gleba explore the scale of textile production needed to underpin the growth and deployment of Athenian naval power. In doing so, they demonstrate the potential ways in which research on technological production can contribute to understanding broader issues of early and ancient economics. The authors calculate the extraordinary number of work hours needed to produce sail cloth, arguing that 18 months of spinning and 12 months of weaving might be needed to provide for just a single ship. Textile production is suggested as a household affair, which makes the level of production needed to provide sail cloth for a fleet of c. 300 ships a daunting industrial prospect. Athenian society, however, is argued to rely on a sense of collective responsibility. The authors infer that this scale of production was met by distributing the task across 1000s of households, with elite families mobilising the necessary labour and resources. The previously overlooked lives and efforts of numerous producers and workers are recognised in these calculations – those who spun the textiles and wove the cloth. Behind the epic tales of seafaring naval prowess, it is refreshingly thought-provoking to see the work of subaltern household forces highlighted, with women, slaves, and children producing linen on an industrial scale to service military and entrepreneurial seafaring exploits.
A more extreme mobilisation of collective resources to suit the needs of elite exploitation is carefully brought out in Kirchner’s discussion of the step change in hydraulic technologies in Catalonia c. 1100 CE. In the Ebro valley, a phase of technological development following the Christian conquest of Tortosa resulted in the colonisation of land and the introduction of multiple hydraulic systems used to release the capacity of water meadows and river Islands for more extensive production of cereals, vines, olive and fruit trees. This study sits within a growing genre of work that highlights technological innovations associated with the spread of Christianity and the collective enterprise of monastic communities, ranging from the introduction of stone building and mortar technologies, hydraulics, literacy and even manuring and cultivation practices. However, in the Ebro Valley, these technological innovations were launched at scale by ecclesiastical and secular elites in terms of constructing water catchment dams, channels and watermills at the expense of local community practice. Marking a step change from more consensual approaches to land and water management, elites instigated the construction of channels and watermills to maximise outputs, cultivating new land and expanding crop production as well as annexing common land and controlling pasture. The result was not just massive physical changes and a new aesthetic, but a technological uplift and new restrictive regimes imposed on local communities.
Technology, power and public display
In early Iron Age north-west China, the presence of gold appliqués in graves signals another kind of elite display, centred on the management of specialist technologies and materials. Populations of north-west China and the central Asian Steppe were nomadic in the 3rd to 2nd centuries BCE. Focusing on the Xigou cemetery, Lui, Tan, Yang and Ma explore the changing production techniques, use and context of gold appliqués. These elaborate gold plaques are generally found in tombs and might in some cases be considerably older than their burial context. They seem to have been attached to costume items and were serially produced using moulds or matrices and often carried animal iconography – for example, the gold appliqués from tomb 1 at Xigou, which depict a group of crouching tigers. The importance of gold and the display of these gold items on clothing in large numbers suggest that the visual display of gold, of these symbolic zoomorphic grammars and personal adornment were all critical to the lives and social structures of these nomadic communities. The authors explore iconographic and technological relationships between the Xigou plaques and other gold appliqués found in different cemeteries across the region. The relationships are striking and indicative of cultural connections and networks across an extensive geographic area. Shared aspects of craft production, including mould-pressing techniques, demonstrate a degree of mass production, while find spots indicate these were largely the preserve of the richest tombs and the burials of elites. The plaques and their role in costume emerge as emblems of a particular social rank, political affiliation or group. Specialist production was required and methods of mass production too – and it seems that Chinese workshops adapted their techniques to serve the needs, fashions and tastes of these nomadic elites in the north-west. In turn, they transformed them into a visible and shared grammar of power through which status and wealth could be visually declared.
Subverting ideas that precious metal technologies and their products tend to denote and set apart elite power and identity, Dolfini in this issue instead explores the context of metal finds, notably weapons, in Copper Age Italy. Established interpretations have seen highly invested weapon-rich individuals with multiple finds of metal and non-metal items, including copper-alloy daggers identified as leaders or ‘heroes’ within these communities. By reassessing the funerary record and arguing that metal technologies and metal-equipped burials may have been more common than the archaeological record represents, Dolfini challenges the long-standing relationship between male rank and metalwork and the role of the funeral and grave and the primary mechanism for signalling political power. Metal and other objects and body parts were instrumental in signalling collective and group identity, ancestral connections and perhaps power in Copper Age Italy, but through circulation and reburial rather than through initial display at the funeral and in the grave at first interment. Rather than these metal-rich warrior graves representing political leaders or ‘heroes’, they are argued to be the exception – the neglected or avoided graves – of those who may have suffered unusual or ‘bad’ deaths. Here, in both papers, metal technologies are intrinsic to identity and personhood and are visually and physically integrated within the funerary theatre, but with radically different aims in terms of communicating status and identity.
Creativity, Technology and Identity
In all of the contributions discussed so far technological innovations are exploited or monopolised either by a collective or by a specialist or elite group, and often the innovative products become bound into social display and signalling. Such practices can operate at multiple scales, and Dupuy, Luneau and Rouse bring this aspect out in some detail in their deconstruction of long-held ideas about pottery production in Bronze Age central Eurasia. Traditionally, a division is accepted between ‘northern’ and ‘southern’ pottery of the Late Bronze Age in central Eurasia. The former is generally associated with nomadic steppe pastoralists in the part of the Eurasian steppe encompassing the Altai-steppe and north/central Kazakhstan. The latter is taken to represent the tastes and identities of the southern settled farming societies in the Late Bronze Age residing in the modern regions of Turkmenistan, northern Afghanistan, southern Uzbekistan and south/western Tajikistan. The authors argue that, while ceramic production and consumption patterns do provide evidence of the movements of nomadic groups in central Eurasia, they also potentially support hitherto unrecognised connections and population movements from the south to the north. The authors’ exploration of techniques and circulating ideas of technology and production also offers the suggestion that exotic ceramics and potting traditions of the south may have become embedded in local production in the north, signalling macro-scale social relationships cutting across local contexts. Imports of southern pottery in the north also seem to have demarcated a local elite who were able to access long-distance trade networks. Conversely, northern pottery in southern contexts was integrated into daily living in some regions and rejected in others, demonstrating that localised tastes and identities might still contrast with macro-scale access and ceramic innovations.
The tensions of centre and periphery can be equally productive when it comes to technological innovation. In reference to a case study from south-west Britain, Frieman and James in this issue join a trend for rethinking peripheral or marginal regions as areas of innovation and creativity. Marginal regions are often exploited by centres for their resources but the interchange of ideas and goods, the need for dialogue and consensus, can drive not just emulation or aspiration in the periphery but powerful processes of innovation, negotiation, and resistance. Roman-period Cornwall is used to highlight the ways in which marginal communities can come to shape taste and popular culture. The authors argue that the marginal nature of the region, and the friction created by social distance from more cosmopolitan and connected regions, were instrumental in generating a crucible of creativity. The adoption and adaption of Roman-ness, in terms of material culture and practices, is evident in the adoption of new styles of food culture and the long-term curation and use of Roman/Romano-British dress fittings. These changes seem to march in step with a radical change in settlement to enclosed family holdings or ‘rounds’ and open spaces converted into enclosed specialist work areas and enclosed living areas. Changes to land ownership structures are suggested and changes to relations between kin and community. Rather like Kirchner’s take on hydraulic innovations in the Lower Ebro valley, Catalonia, here in south-west Britain significant physical changes to the landscape herald new technologies of living and subsisting but also distinct changes to social structures, hierarchies and organisation.
Across this Special Issue on Technology and Power, authors have argued that materials and technologies of production encode social principles, cultural or economic values. Contributions have revealed how power and social relations might be implicitly and explicitly negotiated at a range of scales through technological innovation, making, creating and deployment. In Costin’s paper on ceramic traditions in North Coast Peru, which concludes this issue, the author draws out a compelling case for the explicit use of pottery technology as a medium for communicating ideological narratives of power and authority in a world without formal writing. For Costin, in an extensive consideration of ceramics (from 1600 BCE to 1450 CE), pots conveyed information and carried visual messaging, with investment in technological improvements, figuration, sculpting and colour appearing in tandem with increase socio-political complexity and an investment in community-wide public ritual. In the 1st millennium CE, the elaborate elite rituals in Moche society were depicted on ceramics, conveyed as information across the decorated surfaces of ceramic vessels. These are argued to operate at multiple scales, the detail visible to users in proximity and the colour, motifs, and forms operating at greater distances carrying messages reinforcing ideas of social structure to participants and onlookers. This multi-vocality is carried forward, despite a deterioration in ceramic technologies after 1000 CE, with ceramics still conveying information central to folk practices and a persistent local identity and sense of place and community for several centuries. In this nuanced paper, the power of technology (in this case ceramic production) as a conduit for multivocal messaging on authority, values, religion, and identity is exposed. That power is curated in the longue durée by modes of production and design and by the makers and specialist producers themselves and their shared community of practice. In this way, Costin provides a fitting end to this special issue by turning the focus away from human control over technology and production, and instead illustrating the agency and power of technological knowledge and material itself and its capacity for facilitating and regulating social power within societies past and present.
Technology and technological change have been central to archaeology for so long that there is a danger that these fields of study will be seen as ‘old hat’, less forward-facing, and thus less worthy of research funding and publication. We hope that the papers in this volume will demonstrate how vital archaeological studies of technology remain to this day, not only in terms of understanding the social dynamics of past societies, but in terms of today’s global challenges. Archaeology is uniquely placed to address the broader human relationship with technology, innovation, and different forms of power, thanks to its emphasis on long-term change, and its ability to reconstruct the social context of technology in diverse pre-industrial societies. Today, technology is often seen as a solution to challenges including population growth, climate change, and sustainability, but here too, power dynamics are at play, whether in the control of energy resources, or the ownership of innovation via the patents system. Archaeology illustrates that not only are various forms of power often inextricably bound up with technological change, but that technological innovation is a costly process, of which failure is an integral part. At a time in which many traditional craft practices and traditions are rapidly being lost, archaeologists have a responsibility to critically examine business and government focus on centralisation and innovation over and above the protection, recording and preservation of traditional, local practices.
Acknowledgments
We are very grateful to Amy Bogaard and Benjamin Roberts for their constructive comments on this editorial prior to publication.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Sarah Semple
Sarah Semple is Head of Archaeology at Durham University where she teaches and researches on the landscapes and material culture of early medieval Britain and Northern Europe. She is the author of Perceptions of the Prehistoric in Anglo-Saxon England (2019) and a co-author of Negotiating the North: Meeting Places in the Middle Ages in the North Sea Zone (2020).
Chloe Duckworth
Dr Chloe Duckworth is a Reader in Archaeological Science and Public Engagement at Newcastle University. Her research focuses on past technology, traditional craft, recycling and sustainability, with a particular interest in the chemistry of ancient and medieval glass. She has directed fieldwork investigating medieval production remains at the Alhambra and Madinat al-Zahra, both in Spain. She recently co-edited The Royal Workshops of the Alhambra (2022), Recycling and Reuse in the Roman Economy (2020) and Mobile Technologies in the Ancient Sahara and Beyond (2020).
David Govantes-Edwards
David Govantes-Edwards is a Research Associate at Córdoba University (Spain). He specializes in the archaeology of technology and the production, distribution and consumption of glass and glazed ceramics in medieval Spain, where he worked for over a decade as a commercial archaeologist. He coordinates several international fieldwork projects in Madīnat al-Zahrā (Córdoba, Spain, UNESCO World Heritage Site), the Alhambra (Granada, Spain, UNESCO World Heritage Site), Bolgar (Republic of Tatarstan, Russian Federation, UNESCO World Heritage Site) and Reccopolis (Guadalajara, Spain), as well as taking part in other high-profile research projects as consultant and specialist.