Event: Friday Seminar: "Motivations and Mechanisms in Technological Change: Examples from the Talc-Faience Complexes of the Indus Valley Tradition"

Speaker: Dr. Heather Miller, University of Toronto

Archaeological interest in technological change focuses on both invention and production by craftspeople, and on social issues related to adoption of new technologies. We recognize that technological change involves both motivations and mechanisms for change, with respect to both the invention and innovation/adoption ends of the spectrum. The possible motivations and mechanisms for the development and spread of the faience materials found across western Eurasia provides an excellent third millennium BCE case study.

A bewildering assortment of materials utilizing siliceous pastes were used to make small objects such as figures, beads and containers, in ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Mediterranean, and regions beyond and between. From very early beginnings in the sixth millennium BCE or earlier in some regions, the assortment of these materials reached great diversity of production technique and material in the third and second millennia BCE, with much less diversity of appearance. In places where these materials have seen more analytical study, such as Egypt and the Indus Valley, similarities but also striking differences occur in the regional assortments of materials and techniques employed to produce quite similar appearing materials, used to make objects clearly belonging to the local corpus of style and topic. The Indus Valley case will be the special focus of my talk, where we must speak of it as a talc-faience complex due to the entwined nature of these materials in the Indus Civilization corpus.

What was involved in the spread of these materials and their manufacture? Technological change includes both new ideas or products, and the adoption of those new ideas or products, both invention and innovation (sensu Torrence and van der Leeuw 1989). For the example of the Indus case, can we find clues to the social process involved in the innovative development of these materials from analysis of the objects and their production?