ON THE GENERAL TYPOLOGY OF ANCIENT PRODUCTION

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ON THE GENERAL TYPOLOGY OF ANCIENT PRODUCTION

Journal Title: Матеріали і дослідження з археології Прикарпаття і Волині - Year 2016, Vol 20, Issue

Abstract

To specify the typology of ancient productions, it is necessary to determine the definitions of these and other activities as well as their place in the life of ancient communities. The author suggests a following set of terms to classify ancient productions. General typology of production activities: household, community, and specialized. Household activities include domestic (home arrangement; daily needs of the family), management (agriculture, animal husbandry – though, the land and livestock can be owned by the community as a whole; procurement, processing, and preservation of animal and plant foodstuffs, including hunting/gathering activities; production of tools for personal use), and family-focused production (tanning; spinning yarn; production of instruments and appliances). Community activities are comprised of administrative (governing functions, redistribution of communal resources, construction of community centers – gords, community buildings, roads, etc.), spiritual (construction of shrines), and community production activities (arrangement and provisioning of the community's production cells, community crafts, such as iron working and smithing, pottery, spinning, tanning, including mass processing of skins and furs for barter, milling, casting, and jewellery making). The author supports the idea of very early progression of spinning and bone carving into crafts. Also, the author strictly rejects the possibility of pottery, even just of the hand-building kind, existing as a household/familial production. In the author's classification, procuring trades are divided into food procuring trades – hunting, fishing, and gathering (including wild honey harvesting), extraction trades – ore, clay, and stone mining, along with their initial processing, limestone extraction, procurement of mineral fertilizers (peat, marl), and salt production, forest activities – logging, bark, birchbark, and sap collection, and, lastly, chemical (as can be applied to ancient time) trades – charcoal, pitch, tar, ash, and potash production. Crafts are a category which, as the author views it, encapsulates exclusively professional and specialized activities ("household crafts" are simple production activities practised to satisfy the needs of one's family, and not actually crafts). Crafts can be community-oriented professional, comissioned by the community, general, and specialized. Essential crafts are crafts fundamentally and always separated from household production activities, professional, specialized, market-oriented activities of individual craftsmen or families practised to satisfy the needs of both the local community and the region in general. This includes metallurgy and metal working, pottery, glass making, and stone working. Community-oriented crafts are, independent from the method of produce distribution, crafts practised professionally, utilizing specialized tools and appliances, practised by craftsmen as a significant activity or even their dominant occupation. General crafts are mainly former so called “household crafts” (tanning, wood working, textile production, etc.) that have grown into professional occupations after the development of stable markets and rise in demand for their produce, becoming significant production activities alongside agriculture and procuring trades. Auxiliary (supplementary) crafts are the initial and transitional stages of essential crafts (ore extraction and enrichment, limestone and lime production, potash production, etc.) that are focused primarily on the produce of procuring trades and are practised as part of the production process of an essential craft (curriers also produced lime for their needs, blacksmiths made charcoal for their forges, and glassmakers dabbled in potash production). Some auxiliary crafts are former household production activities that under favourable circumstances develop into professional and specialized market-oriented crafts and exist alongside the corresponding household productions of the same type. Procuring trades can also transition into auxiliary crafts as their production increases in scope and their product becomes a commodity.

Authors and Affiliations

Victor Vojnarovs'kyi

Keywords

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