At the outset, Kuijpers recounts two seminal moments that radically transformed his approach as an archaeologist. The first was his discovery of Richard Sennett's The Craftsman (Reference Sennett2008) and the wider field of craft research with its focus on makers, materials and skill. A second epiphany occurred during a practical workshop organized by Umha Aois, an experimental project formed of artists and archaeologists whose aim is to rediscover Bronze Age casting methods. Kuijpers joined Umha Aois to acquire basic first-hand learning about bronze, the ways the material is worked and the ways it responds to tool-wielding gestures and forces exerted by artisans. His understanding was further enriched through close interactions with experienced Umha Aios metalworkers who shared their observations and, more importantly, taught Kuijpers the importance of perceptually attuning to the qualities and changing behaviour of the material as it is worked. While making a chisel alongside a metalworker, Kuijpers’ pursuit of a scientific properties-based explanation for knowing when to begin annealing the hammer-hardened object elicited a curt response from the artisan, ‘The metal needs to relax.’
That seemingly pithy statement would in fact revolutionize Kuijpers’ methodology and his analytical framework for studying more than 300 Late Copper Age and Early Bronze Age axes. He came to recognize that, for hands-on making, the metalworker's phenomenologically grounded understanding of the material qualities was no less valid—and arguably more pertinent—than a scientific one of the metal's properties. Discovering the qualities that generate both understanding and enskilment in makers was thereby made central to his study. Accordingly, Kuijpers’ research question shifted from ‘what was done’ in the making of LCA and EBA axes to ‘how it was done’. Producing descriptive accounts of techniques and procedures became secondary to the more challenging investigation of skill. To answer the how within a framework of skill, the archaeologist needed to think the artefacts from the perspective of their makers. Without recourse to science, the conceptual understanding and embodied knowledge of LCA and EBA metalworkers were necessarily rooted in practice and in what could be attended to with vision, hearing and touch—and it is this that Kuijpers is determined to grasp. He progressively resolves that material scientists and craftspeople ‘are not describing different realities, they are simply describing reality differently’.
This is, accordingly, a courageous and ambitious book. Kuijpers makes clear his determination to break new ground and to offer his discipline an innovative approach to the study of material culture of not merely the LCA and EBA, but potentially of all historical periods. In my estimation, he succeeds, and the research opens the way for further development and refinement of his theory, method and conceptual categories.
Kuijpers claims that both the ‘material science’ and the ‘social constructivist’ camps within archaeology perpetuate a (androcentric) narrative that correlates prehistoric metalworking to socio-economic specialization. That association is premised on the assumption that metalworkers were skilled specialists whose social status accrued through working with rare materials, connections to elite classes and, often, links to magic and esoteric knowledge. By disentangling skill from technique, Kuijpers challenges the blanket assumption that all LCA and EBA metalworkers were necessarily ‘skilled’, thereby complicating and unsettling the conventional hypothesis of socio-economic specialization. Vitally, his study asks ‘how skill works?’ and endeavours to empirically demonstrate levels of skill (and lack thereof) in the archaeological record. He seeks answers by squarely focusing not on finished objects and their consumption, but on materials and making. In doing so, his scholarly contribution extends to current investigations into ‘what it means to be skilled in a craft’.
Kuijpers does not take on board phenomenological approaches and the craft literature uncritically. The first half of the book wrestles with Tim Ingold (especially with Ingold's dismissal of cognition and the roles of conceptual thinking and intentionality in design and making) and throughout he tests the ideas of Sennett, Glenn Adamson, David Pye and my own (among others) against his emerging theories and analyses. For Kuijpers, skill entails an intentional engagement with materials to produce something in mind, and with an imagined purpose. That engagement is fundamentally informed by the senses; involves ‘the body as/and tool(s)’, and draws upon both ‘explicit and embodied knowledge’. A maker does not merely act upon materials, but rather the intentions they entertain and their ways of thinking and knowing are dynamically shaped and updated in and through their interaction with materials.
Kuijpers astutely notes that the appraisal of an individual maker's skill is context dependent and will be perceived differently by different individuals in a society. He insists that qualifying an object as being ‘skilfully made’ is contingent upon how it measures up to the purpose intended by its maker. Archaeologists therefore need to examine a large group of similar objects from a defined context thoroughly and take note of ‘the inequality presented by them in view of their physical and mechanical features’. Only then can they validly proceed to the question of ‘what these skills might have meant in terms of social value’.
Examination of an object begins with careful scrutiny of its ‘production traces, errors, overall appearance and finish’; but it must then move beyond the visual characteristics to deliberate on how techniques were applied and the extent to which the application of techniques was made in response to the qualities presented by the material being worked. To structure such an examination, Kuijpers adopts the chaîne opératoire model devised by Leroi-Gourhan and developed by Lemonnier. Along the chain's vertical axis, he sets out the metalworker's techniques of production, from raw material to finished axe. But, notably, Kuijpers adds to the traditional linear chaîne opératoire a horizontal axis containing what he terms ‘perceptive categories’.
The top row of his horizontal axis lists the types of copper compositions available to metalworkers in a given epoch. Kuijpers differentiates the copper types, one from the other, based on perceptible differences in their colour (i.e. the hue—red, orange, yellow, gold, white and silver copper—resulting from the addition of various proportional quantities of tin, antimony and/or nickel). The visual differences, he contends, would have been equally available to the eye of the pre-scientific metalworker. The rows below comprise perceptive categories corresponding to each production technique involved in making an axe. These include the maker's responses to the casting quality of the material, the hardness of an axe, hammering and shaping it, annealing it, and its morphological attributes as an object. Perceptive categories, he reasons, generate nuanced data on how techniques were applied at the various stages of production and thereby make possible an analysis of the skills of the object's maker.
Kuijpers’ dataset of 317 axes from central Europe (with emphasis on the northern Alpine region) includes 217 that were selected from two monographs by Tobias Kienlin, one featured in other publications and 99 studied by the author. The total time span covered by the LCA, EBA I and EBA II corresponds roughly to the late fourth millennium bc to 1500 bc. The axes from each period are presented in three successive chapters. In his analysis of an individual axe, Kuijper uses what I propose be called the ‘matrice opératoire’ (operational matrix) to plot the level of skill involved at each technical stage of its production. In the book, diagrams of these are included alongside scaled photographs of the axe in question. Cleverly, he amalgamates the results for each epoch into a single ‘matrice opératoire’ in order to determine numerically and display visually the ‘standard of the time’ in terms of the most common application of techniques and most common links between techniques. The collective matrix also allows him to compare and contrast, and thereby to detect where innovations were made and risk taken at various stages of production.
The data generated from Kuijpers’ study of the LCA axes reveal that, despite the fairly standardized technology of the period, considerable variation in skill levels existed among metalworkers. In general, LCA makers appear to have been risk averse and to have taken a ‘good enough’ approach to their workmanship. The EBA I period, by contrast, was one of experimentation and change, and makers had access to five distinct copper types. Kuijpers’ analysis exposes how metalworkers responded to that variety of raw materials, each one possessing its own qualities and behaviours. The impressive range in skill is made plain by the collective matrice opératoire. A select number of makers were evidently successful in their strivings to discover the very limits of their material, whether the properties of that material were best suited for the task, or not; while, at the opposite end of the skills spectrum, some makers failed to recognize and to respond to the qualities of the metal and thus their attempts to produce an axe failed or yielded substandard results.
The EBA II period is characterized by greater use of a more limited array of tin-bronze types (i.e. ‘yellow copper’ and ‘gold copper’). Popular use of these metals occasioned a much larger proportion of high-quality, harder axes. Effectively, this fact makes the archaeologist's task of distinguishing EBA II axes on the basis of technical skill more difficult. Two significant findings nevertheless emerged from Kuijpers’ analyses. Firstly, it appears that many axes of this period were perceived by their makers as ‘good enough’ (i.e. hard enough), thereby eliminating the need to push the material to its limits with further hammering. And, because EBA II axes are typically of high standard, it was challenging for makers to produce one ‘that stood out for its superior mechanical quality’.
Not surprisingly, the axes that deviate from the standard present the most interesting case studies. These reveal the fuller range of makers’ aptitudes, from the unskilled (or less skilled) amateur to the master and the virtuoso maker. This discovery was precisely the aim of Kuijpers’ method. Each of the three ‘period’ chapters ends with a discussion of an axe(s) that is highly distinct from the standard of its time, thereby promoting reflection on whether it served a special purpose and function; and, importantly, whether it was produced with a different set of intentions in mind. The author's in-depth examination of the Thun-Renzenbühl axe, made during the EBA II period, is particularly illuminating. He concludes that the success of the innovations introduced by its maker stemmed from his/her abilities to employ extraordinary techniques in combination with the standard ones of their time, and to reference the standard morphological features of contemporaneous axes.
With the hard work of empirical investigation completed, the final chapters of the book turn to deeper theoretical interrogations of the various levels of material specialization and skill that coexisted in an epoch; the necessity for understanding the intentionality of makers; what the author calls ‘axe-making recipes’ for producing axes of different purpose (e.g. axe-tool, -weapon, -ingot, -simulacrum and -exceptional); and the pivotal role that ‘attentiveness’ to the materials plays in becoming skilled. ‘Material,’ he concludes, ‘is the mother of innovation.’
Perhaps most significantly, Kuijpers employs his findings to contest the ‘grand narrative about the Bronze Age’. That narrative, he claims, rests upon a model of political economy that is too heavily vested in the uppermost echelons of society, comprising elite patrons and highly specialized makers. This, he convincingly argues, ignores a large part of the archaeological record—namely common axes as well as other everyday objects that were produced by amateur and ordinary craftspeople. The roles of these people and those they produced for need to be integrated into the construction of fuller, more complex accounts of Bronze Age society and political economy. What Kuijper brings to the table is, in his words, ‘an attempt to theorise the ordinary […] in order to understand complexity’.
In sum, Kuijpers demonstrates scholarly authority in his particular field and adeptness at enriching archaeological theory with pertinent ideas and thinking from other disciplines and artisanal activities. His book is also engagingly written. It elegantly unveils the intentionality, perceptions and skills that our distant ancestors brought to making functional things and, sometimes, to mastering their understanding and response to the raw materials to hand. An Archaeology of Skill will undoubtedly be of interest to lecturers and students of archaeology, anthropology, material culture studies and craft studies, and, I expect, to contemporary designer-makers as well with an interest in the nature of their skilled practice.
