Nascent craft specialization in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A? Bead making at Shubayqa 6 (northeast Jordan)
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The emergence of craft specialisation is a key area of interest for archaeologists investigating the socio-economic history and development of past societies. In southwest Asia, as elsewhere, the origins of craft specialisation have been associated with the emergence of surplus food production, households and social stratification. We present evidence for nascent skilled production of green stone beads at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPNA) site Shubayqa 6, northeast Jordan. Thousands of pieces of debitage, roughouts and finished beads exhibit signs of standardised production that was probably geared towards exchange. This hints towards incipient skilled craft production that was likely part-time and seasonal. We therefore argue that the appearance of specialist artisans in this autonomous and non-hierarchical society has no correlation with surplus food production, households, or social stratification.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | e0292954 |
| Journal | PLoS ONE |
| Volume | 18 |
| Issue number | 12 |
| Number of pages | 27 |
| ISSN | 1932-6203 |
| DOIs | |
| Publication status | Published - 2023 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:
The research reported in this paper was enabled by grants from the Independent Research Fund Denmark (DFF – 4001-00068 and DFF-8018-00133B), the Danish Institute in Damascus and the H.P. Hjerl Mindefondet for Dansk We express our sincere gratitude to the Department of Antiquities of Jordan for giving permission to conduct fieldwork at Shubayqa 6. We are grateful to our local host community in alSafawi, and especially Mr Ali Shreitir for help in the field. We would like to thank Alexis Pantos for the photographs reproduced in Figs 2–4 & 12 and in the bead experiment report (S2 Appendix), and Lisa Yeomans for the site plan reproduced in Fig 2 and for the photograph reproduced in Fig 10. We would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their comments.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2023 Thuesen et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.
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