Craft Traditions

Abstract Craft traditions are some of the most durable of human institutions, preserving and transmitting knowledge and skills related to material culture. Their study has relevance to a range of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, and the history of technology. From an evolutionary perspective they offer the opportunity to study culture at a range of scales, from the behaviours of individual craftspeople to broad-scale patterns of culture, and they are an important testing ground for theoretical models of how culture evolves. This chapter begins by reviewing how craft traditions are transmitted at the micro-scale, focussing on apprenticeships and apprenticeship-like processes, then explores the macro-scale consequences of this type of transmission. Three case studies are discussed that offer the opportunity to evaluate cultural evolutionary models in detail, using a mix of classical and phylogenetic approaches. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of the implications for future anthropological research.