Info Backlog.

There is a bunch of emails with interesting content in my inbox, and it's time for me to finally post all that stuff here.

First of all, the knitted 16th century cap collection of the Museum of London is now online. The
73 caps, coifs, cap fragments, linings and earpieces have been newly photographed, with captions containing contextual and technical information. All the pieces will have their full captions in the next two weeks.

The caps and their parts are of a large group of material excavated from sites around London by
workmen in the early 20th century. They represent an insight into everyday urban clothing and a high level of technical skill in their knitted, fulled and napped construction. Caps of this style are in collections across Europe and North America and are the focus of a lot of research interest, so we are pleased to make a large group available to the wider research community.

To browse the caps, go to the Collections Online site and enter ‘cap’ in the Keyword field with the date range 1500-1600 in the search fields.

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If you are in the mood for a conference in the winter, here's a call for papers: ‘Crafting-in-the-World: the temporal and spatial dynamics of craft and its practitioners’. It is a proposed session for the 34th Annual Meeting of the Theoretical Archaeology Group, which will be held at the University of Liverpool, United Kingdom, from the 17th-19th of December 2012. You can view the conference website at: http://www.liv.ac.uk/sace/livetag/index.htm and get more info there. 

Crafting-in-the-World: the temporal and spatial dynamics of craft and its practitioners.
Whilst the last two decades have witnessed a prolific interest in craft studies, which have increasingly acknowledged the sociality of craft, the role of choice, and the importance of the body in the development and transmission of craft traditions, there remains an uncomfortable dichotomy between the temporal and spatial understandings of craft practice. The abundance of existing research has traditionally focused on either describing production processes or attempted to theorise how the finished products of craft acquire meaning. The separation of object from process has resulted in the products of craft looming un-tethered to practice, devoid of spatial and temporal understandings of craft practice.
In addition and despite claims to the contrary to this, there has been little coherent collaboration between academic specialisms, which has only served to heighten the fragmented nature of craft study and impeded our understanding of the subject as a whole. In an attempt to address these issues this session will encourage multidisciplinary engagement with the topic of craft, focusing on the temporal and spatial embeddedness of craft activities; what we term Crafting-in-the-World.
We are seeking contributions that will discuss the acts and arenas of production and the reunification of products with their formative processes to embrace a holistic approach to the study of innovation, production, and consumption. To complement this we invite papers that examine the intrinsic relationship between practice and space, exploring the ways in which practice is manifested in the landscape through time, looking at both the physical remains of production and the expression of crafting traditions. Contributions addressing experimental work are particularly welcome.

Papers for the session could address the following themes:
•       Reconciling continuity and change: redundancy, innovation and change (every innovation involves loss and gain); re-contextualisation of innovations; why some things change and others don’t (i.e., there is no such thing as progress).
•       Spatial articulation of craft: technological ‘features’ as architecture; space shaping practices and practices shaping space; compartmentalization of space and time geographies.
•       Tangled web of technological practice: communities of practice; Complementing, referencing, incorporating aspects of other crafts; mobile crafts (i.e., itinerant crafts people).
 
If you wish to submit to the session, please email j.slater@shef.ac.uk by the 27th of June with the following:
 •       Paper title (maximum of 20 words)
 •       Paper abstract (150 words max)
 •       Your name, affiliation and contact details.

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There's a  new magazine (or e-zine) out called Kritische Archäologie (Critical Archaeology), and it seems to be at least partly in English. The whole first issue can be seen on their website.

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And finally, there's another online database of stuff: OPAL, Lower Saxonia's portal of artefacts. I have not (yet) found much textile stuff there, but it's worth a browse nevertheless.

That's it for today - hopefully you have found something that interests you!