Abstract

Metalworkers located in emporia, trading centres, or urban sites more generally, are near always revered by academic scholars as ‘specialists’, in multiple-uses of the term, as well as being important agents for changes in society. This presentation begs to antagonise such common held perceptions of early medieval craftspeople and aims to contextualise urban metalworking in relation to the wider evidence available to archaeologists; should rural instances of crucible metallurgy be considered separate from full-time dedicated urban craft specialists? Can we delineate varying competences in metalworking that disambiguate the term ‘specialist’ into more well defined and meaningful groups of practitioners? To what degree should we perceive craft as agency in urban settlements? Far from providing all the answers, the talk aims to push us away from appreciating all metalworkers as specialists towards a more complex understanding of craftspeople.