SKILL · Individual Variations and Cultural Evolution: The pottery wheel-throwing skill as a case study

Individual Variations and Cultural Evolution: The pottery wheel-throwing skill as a case study

While the apprenticeship of craft skills is to be understood as a socially mediated individual learning, the ensuing prediction of individual and cultural marking within craft communities – in both the craftsmen motor skills and the ensuing artifacts – has not been addressed. The first objective of the SKILL project was to fill up this gap by measuring the motor skills variations among members of pottery-making communities. The second objective was to measure the vessel shapes variations among craftsmen in those communities. A related question concerns the perception by the craftsmen of these vessel shapes variations. If craftsmen identify the slight differences characterizing the vessels produced by distinct members of their community, they could thus select the individual variant they prefer, and disseminate it by reproduction. The third objective of the SKILL project was to test this premise. In the SKILL project I bring an experimental approach to explore these issues, with the aim of providing an assessment of (i) the variations of motor skill occurring through cultural transmission, (ii) the variations in the ensuing vessel shapes and (iii) the perception of the vessel shapes variations by the craftsmen. The main results of the SKILL project show for the first time how much culture can influence craft skills and why imitation alone is not sufficient to explain the development of complex motor skills. Results highlight the joint effects of cultural, transcultural and individual features in the hand positions (repertoire and sequence) used by potters. Moreover, individual-specific features were documented in the fashioning patterns of the vessels, even though these vessels were culturally standardized. This provides evidence that the potters’ skills are imprinted by the cultural context where they have been learnt, however their skills are not fully determined by a cultural model copied during the learning. The findings suggest that archaeologists should bear in mind that artifacts falling into homogeneous geometrical types are not produced by culturally standardized manufacturing patterns but by behaviours containing both cultural and individual features. More broadly, I assume that the pool of individual variants in any complex motor skill constitute a source of diversity, for both material and nonmaterial end results. In the field of educational psychology, these studies help to better understand the role of social models on motor learning. Asking learners to copy elders’ skill can be helpful only if this instruction is presented to learners as a support to discover by themselves an efficient motor skill.

Текст от CORDIS, на английски · Данни: CORDIS, © Европейски съюз