Textile Workers. Skills, Labour and Status of Textile Craftspeople Between the Prehistoric Aegean and the Ancient Near East, pp. 91-108, 2020/04/30
Proceedings of the Workshop held at 10th ICAANE in Vienna, April 2016
This paper reviews the theories from anthropology and psychology of how to learn a craft. It assumes that the learning methods will affect the resulting craft production. It also draws on the author’s personal experiences with crafts and with learning processes. These experiences and theories are compared to the Linear B inscriptions on the training of children in the Mycenaean textile industry at Knossos. It is argued that our knowledge of the standardised textile production in Mycenaean palaces as well as our knowledge of the training modalities of child labour can help us understand what kind of training was undertaken and organised by the Mycenaean palaces.
Keywords: Bronze Age; Mycenaean; child labour; apprenticeship; textile workers