Approaching Specialisation: Craft Production in Late Neolithic/Copper Age Iberia

Abstract

While political models of craft specialisation are integral to archaeological frameworks describing social complexity, they do not adequately describe the emergence of nascent specialists in the absence of concomitant regional, political and economic organisation. This paper reviews several examples of craft production in the Late Neolithic/Copper Age of southern Iberia. In particular, it focuses on the production of engraved slate plaques as an example of how Late Neolithic/Copper Age prestige objects may comprise an intermediate step in this process, approaching traditional models of craft specialisation in some respects, but defying them in others. It suggests that social practices such as the systematic production and consumption of rarefied or prestigious objects have a recursive relationship with the emergence of social complexity, forming the underlying basis of more institutionalised forms of specialisation and social inequality.