The Political Economy of Craft Production: Crafting Empire in South India, c.1350-1650

Description

The study of specialised craft production has a long tradition in archaeological research. Through analyses of material remains and the contexts of their production and use, archaeologists can examine the organization of craft production and the economic and political status of craft producers. This new study combines archaeological and historical evidence from the author's twenty years of fieldwork at the imperial capital of Vijayanagara to explore the role and significance of craft production in the cities' political economy of the fourteenth to the seventeenth century. By examining a diverse range of crafts from poetry to pottery, Sinopoli evaluates models of craft production and expands upon theoretical and historical understandings of empires in general and Vijayanagara in particular. It is the most broad-ranging study of craft production in South Asia, or in any other early state empire.

Carla M. Sinopoli is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology of the University of Michigan and Associate curator of Asian Archaeology in the Museum of Anthropology at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Pots and Palaces: The Earthenware Ceramics of the Noblemen's Quarter of Vijayanagara (1993), Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics (1991) and co-editor of Empires: Comparative Perspectives from Archaeology and History.

'One of the most significant publications in the archaeology of South Asia to appear in the last decade ... [Sinopoli] demonstrates that careful dialogue with indigenous understandings that are embodied in texts, as well as with the historians who privilege such sources, can contribute significantly to our collective knowledge of the products and producers of craft in India and in complex societies more generally.' South Asian Studies