In chapter 6, I presented information on the technology, organization, and producers of a number of categories of crafts ranging from epic poems to flaked stone tools. In this chapter, I explore the roles and positions of craft producers in broader South Indian social, economic, and political contexts and interactions. I first examine relations between various communities of craft producers and major administrative and sacred institutions of fourteenth- through seventeenth-century South India before turning to a discussion of relations among individuals and various communities of producers.

The discussion in this chapter relies heavily on the written record, and particularly inscriptions, and archaeological evidence plays a very small role in parsing out the many kinds of relations between and among craft producers and diverse institutions. If more archaeological fieldwork were conducted throughout territories claimed by the Vijayanagara empire, we would likely be able to draw broader interpretations from material remains. Systematic survey and excavation around the large Vijayanagara-period temple centers, where much of our written evidence derives, and in areas of known iron and steel production, could prove particularly valuable.

However, even with more and better archaeological data, many questions would remain unanswered. As noted in chapter 6, crafts like weaving leave very little archaeological evidence given the technologies employed in South India, and weaving households would be difficult to identify except under ideal conditions of preservation and fine-scale excavation and documentation of household or workshop contexts that could permit the identification of diagnostic spatial patterning and/or artifact distributions.