No place like home for metalworkers: Household-based metal production at Early Bronze Age Çukuriçi Höyük and beyond

ABSTRACT

This article questions the cross-cultural ethnographic insight of metalworking as a male craft, commonly performed in male spaces (workshops) away from female members of society, through the analysis of archaeological evidence for the household-based metal production within multi-gendered and multi-generational households and corresponding but rare ethnographic examples.

KEYWORDS:

• Metalworking
• gendered labour
• household archaeology
• ethnographic exceptions
• Early Bronze Age

Acknowledgements

Versions of this research were presented at the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle/Saale (2019), at the SIEF – International Society for Ethnology and Folklore Congress (2021), and as an IFK lecture at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna (2021). The active involvement of attendees through valuable comments and engaging discussions significantly contributed to the refinement of the ideas presented in this article. I am also grateful for conversations with my fellow DOC-team colleagues – archaeologist Maria Röcklinger and zooarchaeologist Stephanie Emra – who shared their invaluable data and impressions with me over the past years. I would like to express my gratitude to Barbara Horejs, who generously allowed me to use data from Çukuriçi, as well as to Andre Gingrich, Mathias Mehofer, Christoph Schwall, and Anna Wessman for their insightful conversations on various aspects of this work. I thank Roderick Salisbury for language editing and further suggestions. I extend further gratitude to the editor and the two anonymous reviewers whose encouraging comments and constructive critique played a crucial role in helping refine this article.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In archaeometallurgy – the study of prehistoric mining and metallurgy – the topic of gender may be addressed in passing, as taken for granted, or not addressed at all. For example, in David Killick and Thomas Fenn’s (2012) contribution on archaeometallurgy in the Annual Review of Anthropology, the authors avoid the question of gender, except for providing what they call an African example, where sometimes furnaces were ‘modelled as women’s bodies or bellows as male genitalia’, being ‘a classic example of the symbolic appropriation by men of women's generative powers’ (Killick and Fenn 2012, 567).

2 This study resulted from an interdisciplinary project ‘The Role of Households at the Dawn of the Bronze Age’, funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences DOC-team (70291) fellowship. The project was based on cooperation between two prehistoric archaeologists (Maria Röcklinger, Constanze Moser), a zooarchaeologist (Stephanie Emra) and myself, a socio-cultural anthropologist. Our research focused on studying households, household activities, and settlement organisation as a primary source for discussing social organisation in the EBA, at the beginning of the third millennium BC in the Aegean. Maria Röcklinger studied formation processes and ceramics for the EBA layers at Çukuriçi (see Röcklinger 2015).

3 Çukuriçi Höyük was excavated between 2009 and 2014 by Prof. Barbara Horejs and her team from the Austrian Archaeological Institute in Vienna.

4 Symmetry of debt, however, cannot guarantee egalitarian relations within Çukuriçi households (see Collier and Yanagisako 1987, Yanagisako and Delaney 1995).

Additional information

Funding

The research for this article was funded by the Austrian Academy of Sciences (OeAW) DOC-team (70291) and Post-DocTrack (85076) grants.