Practises of practise: Between Crafts People and Digital Tools

The study of craft and craft production is fundamental to archaeology for understanding the underlying causes for the complexity of ancient societies. Craft and craft production can be said to meet the social and psychological needs of human beings, and facilitate social coherence. This emerges at the very first stages of production of objects and involves the diverse choices of materials, tools and techniques. An archaeological object represents dynamic actions and processes and it is essential to understand which actions influence the finished product. On the other hand, a crafts person’s actions and their movements in creating and making an object express and have the potential to communicate an embodied knowledge, conscious as well as non-conscious. For example, there are work elements such as movements which are necessary to learn, but which after training can be executed without thinking, but still influence the finished product.

Our aim in this project is to illuminate how the body, mind and environment are involved in the production processes behind ancient technology and the creation of textiles, by developing the use of Experimental Archaeology, Motion Capture, Cognitive Motor Neuroscience, 3D modelling and scanning and Acoustic analysis for recording and understanding textiles and textile craft processes.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Participants

PI Eva Andersson Strand, Centre for Textile Research/Archaeology Saxo institute, University of Copenhagen

Mark Schram Christensen, Department for Neuroscience, Panum institute, University of Copenhagen

Carolina Larsson, Lund University Humanities Lab, Sweden

Stefan Lindgren, Lund University Humanities Lab, Sweden

Ida Demant, Land of Legends Lejre, Denmark

Magdalena Öhrman, University of Wales Trinity Saint David

Ad hoc craft people

MA and PhD students

Contact

PI: Eva Andersson Strand, Centre for Textile Research/Archaeology Saxo institute, University of Copenhagen