Archaeology and Apprenticeship: Body Knowledge, Identity, and Communities of Practice

10. Apprenticeship and Learning from the Ancestors: The Case of Ancient Urkesh

203 CHAPTER TEN Apprenticeship and Learning from the Ancestors The Case of Ancient Urkesh Marilyn Kelly-Buccellati A topic widely discussed by archaeologists interested in the development of identity in the prehistoric and early historic record is the growth of self-consciousness, a topic that has a long history in Syro-Mesopotamia. It is best exemplified by the exploits of Gilgamesh, a mythical third millennium king ruling the southern Mesopotamian city of Uruk who, through experiencing friendship and death, comes to the realization of his humanity and the need to exercise benevolence and good judgment in carrying out his responsibilities. In any society, a component of this growing experience of self-consciousness is the awareness on the part of individuals that they belong to a specific group to which they contribute and from which they receive both insights and information. Apprenticeship plays an important role in forming this individual and group identity, in such a way that both the teacher and the apprentice benefit on many levels from the relationship. Apprenticeship is central to the early transmission of cultural practices and social traditions due to its ability to provide a positive setting within which both technical knowledge and behavioral norms are transferred in the formation of identities. This knowledge transfer can take several forms, through direct contact or through the indirect observation of results. In the case I am proposing here, inspiration 204 Archaeology and Apprenticeship stems from the earlier products of a craft tradition that is in some way still alive in the community of practice. Two lines of investigation are followed in this study. In the first case, I consider a prominent example of the direct transmission from teacher to student, here the transmission of knowledge from scribe to apprentice scribe. Ancient Mesopotamian textual sources give us information on formalized apprenticeship dedicated to the training of scribes; some archaeological evidence bears on the practices of the scribe but not directly on the relationship with the student apprentices. However, archaeology does sometimes provide insight into the more informal types of teaching and learning, often in family groups (Costin 1991, 2001; Costin and Wright 1998; Ingold 2000, 339–372; Kamp 2001; Wallaert-Pêtre 2001). My second case involves the transfer of knowledge by emulation (Bell 2002) and experimentation. In this case, the teacher is not present, only the products produced by the craft. While this is an expansion of the definition of apprenticeship in a strict sense, I think it is valid because it takes into consideration the fact that the archaeological record can at times attest to the desire of the later practitioner to learn from aspects of craft traditions no longer practiced in the community. It is then not a direct transmittal and not a direct social context but rather one of appreciation and respect, shown through emulation, by the “student” of craft products formed within ancient craft traditions—so much so that aspects of these earlier traditions are imitated in some way. This second example studies the more indirect transfer of knowledge, a sort of metaphorical or, we might say, “time-gap” apprenticeship, involving the rediscovery of skills from the past that were lost in the detail but remained alive in the general tradition of a given craft and were revived through the inspiration provided by objects made by previous generations. In the same way that experimental archaeology seeks to replicate methods and techniques of past craft traditions, some ancient potters sought to utilize a model-based approach to establish a similar set of conditions in order to produce similar ceramics. Where there were no teachers, models had to suffice. The teacher is, however, presupposed, even if not physically present, because the emulator-apprentice operates in the same setting as that intervening between a normal apprentice and teacher who goes through the physical steps of a set production sequence (a chaîne opératoire). The reference to experimental archaeology is instructive. While an archaeologist looks from the outside at a broken tradition and seeks to reconstruct primarily a physical object with its typological characteristics, an ancient time-gap apprentice lives within the same community of practice and re-creates an object starting from the experience of procedures and functional use that are shared with the ancestors. Apprenticeship and Learning from the Ancestors 205 For both cases, examples are used from the excavations at Tell Mozan the site of the ancient Syro-Mesopotamian city of...