Is it possible to explore human creativity through material evidence? Can we find tangible evidence for this? Is it archeologically accessible? The task of finding an answer to these questions is led by three women in this volume, which derives from the Humanities in the European Research Area-funded project ‘Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe’, undertaken in 2010–2013 by researchers from the universities of Southampton, Cambridge, and Trondheim, the National Museum of Denmark, the Natural History Museum of Vienna, the Zagreb Archaeological Museum, the UK Crafts Council, and the Lejre Centre for Historical-Archaeological Research and Communication in Denmark (www.cinba.net). This three-year project was intended to ‘explore developments in crafts that we take for granted: pottery, textiles, and metalwork. It investigates objects as a means to understand local and transnational creative activities, examining the use of decorative motifs and the techniques and skill employed in their creation’ (http://new.heranet.info/category/project-title/creativity-and-innovation/cinba).
The volume offers preliminary results on defining creativity and the conditions it requires. The starting premise is that creativity is a specific quality associated with the manufacture of objects and their appearance (p. 3). Creativity would thus be the realization of ideas or ambitions, through a given material, in the form of a set of practical actions. While ability itself is intangible, its results are tangible (p. 11) and, therefore, potentially approachable from an archaeological point of view through the study of crafts, and perceptible through changes (e.g. the appearance of new forms or the elaboration or alteration of existing forms). The editors point out that, although creativity is usually linked to innovation, these two concepts are not synonymous, since creativity refers to a broader phenomenon that includes the exploration, reconfiguration, and development of stable and practical expressions. Additionally, creative actions are usually related to individual actions, and to the assumption of innate abilities or personalities (p. 4). In this sense, creative actions follow the premise that the act of making generates its own ontological change, since it demands knowledge and development, and therefore implies an ongoing making (i.e. becoming) of the person. In short, through the socially constituted experiences of daily work on a given material, people make sense of and transform the world (Calvo Trias & García Roselló, Reference Calvo Trias and García Roselló2014: 16).
In the book under review, creativity is considered to be a social rather than an individual phenomenon (p. 2). Since craft is a way of ‘thinking through the hands’ (Adamson, Reference Adamson2010), it is possible to access collective or social mentalities through the material. To achieve this, a long-term perspective is required, which here is limited to the European Bronze Age (2500–500 bc), a period characterized by intensive long-distance interaction networks, substantial changes in the ritual sphere, and strong indications of the formalization of a cosmology (p. 1), very much in line with Kristiansen and Larsson's (Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005) vision. From a geographical point of view, the book covers a broad north-south axis across the continent, including Scandinavia, central, and south-western Europe.
The essays collected in this book explore the nature of creativity by examining three main themes (p. 2): 1) the exploitation of the properties of raw materials (bronze, textile fibres, and clay); 2) the production processes of the objects made with these materials; 3) the range of effects that can be achieved through the appearance and manipulation of finished objects. Three materials and their corresponding crafts are selected for this tour: wool in textile production, metal in metallurgy, and clay in ceramic production. To complete this tripartite conception and following this scheme, the volume is structured in three parts, each focused on one of the themes listed above, and framed by an introduction and a concluding chapter by the editors (Part One, ‘Raw Materials: Creativity and the Properties of Materials’; Part Two, ‘Production Practices’; Part Three, ‘Effects: Shape, Motifs, Colour, and Texture’). In Parts Two and Three the topics discussed are illustrated with a selection of fifteen case studies (five in Part Two and ten in Part Three).
Overall, the structure of the book reflects its focus on processes and materials, rather than on results, drawing inspiration from a variety of sources, such as Ingold's (Reference Ingold2007) work, structuralism (Leroi-Gourham, Reference Leroi-Gourhan1965; Mauss, Reference Mauss and Mauss1979), the anthropology of technology (e.g. Lemonnier, Reference Lemonnier1993), Social Agency Theory, and the ‘intercontextual’ approach proposed by Kristiansen and Larsson (Reference Kristiansen and Larsson2005). In terms of materials, the chapters contribute to developing a distinction between properties and qualities. Properties are understood as innate, physical, chemical, and kinetic aspects independent of the human. Qualities refer to how such properties come into existence in new ways once they are recognized and manipulated by humans. This idea had been put forward by Pye (Reference Pye1968: 45), who stated that ‘the qualities are subjective: they are in here, in our heads’, and developed by Ingold (Reference Ingold2007) in his argument on ‘matter against materiality’. Regarding practices, the contributors to the volume explore operational sequences, the decisions made, and how creativity can be expressed through them. Methodologically, the interest lies in observing variations in operational sequences, their singular or patterned nature, in the emergence of new practices, and in transfers between established crafts. By underlining the difference between skill and technique, the contributors to this book dwell on an approach advanced by Kuijpers (Reference Kuijpers2017). They develop a version of the concept of operational sequence that is based on the notion of skill, as well as a methodology for its identification in archaeology. This approach follows previous work that proposed alternative versions of the operational sequence in order to highlight the relevance of the senses in understanding skills in metallurgical practice (Comendador Rey, Reference Comendador Rey and Montero2010) or the close relationship between practice and social space (e.g. Calvo Trias & García Roselló, Reference Calvo Trias and García Roselló2014 for ceramics).
To my mind, because of its applicability, the most interesting part of the book is Part Three, which can be summarized by a passage by Buchli (Reference Buchli2016: 186) quoted in the book by Sebastian Becker (p. 207): ‘The body and the material world emerge and decay—they are unstable—what is stable, however, are the cosmological principles, which structure the world’. Material culture plays a fundamental role in the articulation of religious ideas, by giving them an experiential dimension. The verification of how Bronze Age cosmological narratives created a framework that led to the creation of specific effects is an essential concern of the ‘Creativity and Craft Production in Middle and Late Bronze Age Europe’ project: cosmological principles become design principles, while the motives themselves are held as creative bridges between ideology and materiality.
One of the key achievements of the book is the coherence and integration of its contents, as shown by its efficient editorial input, constructive coordination, and co-authorship. Furthermore, the structure of the book makes it possible to follow up ideas in its various sections. Most interestingly, the book reveals how the technologies employed cross the different operational sequences used for the various materials, and how they cross-fertilize each other (e.g. the twisting of textile fibres, the twisting of metal, and corded ceramics). Another aspect that I applaud is the gender balance among the eleven European contributors, which in addition to the three (female) editors, include Grahame Appleby, Sebastian Becker, Sophie Bergebrant, Sarah Coxon, Sølvi Helene Fossøy, Karina Grömer, Flemming Kaul, Darko Maričević, Sanjin Mihelić, Antoinette Rast-Eicher, and Helga Rösel-Mautendorfer. The book includes useful graphic information, especially the graphics formalizing the technical operational sequences (figs. 2.1, 2.2, and 2.3).
Perhaps the most questionable aspect of the book is the Eurocentrism of the its sources. It is difficult to find references from outside the Nordic-British sphere among the 500 or so titles cited. Unfortunately, this ‘inbreeding’ is a problem of the broader discipline rather than of this book. Yet, given its intended pan-European scope, it would have been relevant to draw from the diverse literature that has been produced on the topic in other European regions and globally. I also wonder what would happen if the long-term perspective were to be extended beyond the Bronze Age. Is the Bronze Age a particularly relevant period from a technological point of view in relation to other periods? Neither the present volume's editors nor its contributors tell us why the European Bronze Age is especially significant. Nonetheless, if we understand creativity as a complex phenomenon that brings together the properties of materials, processes, aesthetic ideals, and beliefs, and stimulates existing material expressions in new directions, we can see how this research venture can lead us to better understand societies by introducing the human (or anthropological) dimension.
In short, this is an interesting and inspiring book, not only because it opens new lines of research, but also because it offers a productive way to apprehend the intangible through the tangible, the ideas through the material. It opens new interpretative doors for our understanding of creativity, not only specifically in the Bronze Age. It shows the way archaeology can develop the study of human societies through material beyond the creation of catalogues of ‘dead’ forms, proposing a means of capturing things past, which, in Proust's words ‘bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection’ (Proust, Reference Proust1922).
