As archaeologists, we seek to understand variation and change in past human societies. This goal necessitates a comparative approach, and comparisons justify the broad cross-cultural and diachronic scope of our work. Without comparisons we sink into the culture-bound theorizing against which anthropology and archaeology have long sought to broaden social science research. By undertaking comparisons that incorporate long-term social variability, archaeologists not only improve our understanding of the past, but also open the door to meaningful transdisciplinary research. Archaeologists have unique and comprehensive data sets whose analysis can contribute to dialogues surrounding contemporary issues and the myriad challenges of our era.

In the past two decades, the pendulum seems to have swung away from comparative research in archaeology. Many archaeologists focus on detailed contextual descriptions of individual cases, and only a few have dedicated themselves to explicit comparative work. Yet in that same time span, fieldwork has expanded tremendously throughout the world, leading to an explosion of well-documented diachronic data on sites and regions. We now have substantial detail on the variation inherent in phenomena such as cultural assemblages, settlement patterns, and economic activity. New methods, from dating techniques to digital data processing, promote comparative analysis and greatly advance our understanding of human societies and change. The time is ripe for a renewed commitment to comparative research in archaeology.

Specialized craft production and craft producers have a prominent place in archaeological studies of early states and empires. Social and economic differentiation are defining characteristics of such societies, and through analyses of material remains and the contexts of their production and consumption, archaeologists can examine both the organization of production and the social, economic, and political statuses and inter-relations of producers and consumers of craft goods. In this work, I examine the social and political significance of craft production and consumption in the Vijayanagara empire, an expansive polity that dominated much of South India from the fourteenth through seventeenth centuries AD.

My study of the political economy of specialized craft production in historic South India situates both political economy and specialized production in the broadest possible frame. I view “political economy” as the relations between political structures and systems (including the constitution of political authority) and the economic realms of production, consumption and exchange (e.g., G. Stein 2001: 356). “Specialized craft production” is understood as the investment of labor by (more or less) skilled practitioners in the production of diverse goods that are in turn consumed by non-producers. My goals are both to learn more about Vijayanagara and the lives and products of the diverse subjects of this large and complex empire, and to contribute to broader theoretical understandings of empires, imperial economies, specialized production, and archaeological and historical approaches to the study of states in South Asia and beyond.

Vijayanagara artisans manufactured an impressive array of craft products, which differed in productive technology, labor investment, and contexts of use. In this chapter, I present information on many of these craft products, and on what we know about the materials, tools, techniques, and geography of their manufacture. I also discuss evidence, derived from archaeological and textual sources, on the social composition, size, and division of labor within craft-producing units and communities. As this discussion will show, there is considerable variation in all of the above dimensions.

Within this variation, two general patterns are evident. The first is the high degree of specialization that existed in the vast majority of productive tasks. There is also evidence that this specialization increased, in at least certain crafts, throughout the Vijayanagara period. This trend is most clearly manifest in textile production, which involved technically specialized weavers, dyers, washers, starchers, cotton carders, tailors, and merchants. Such artisans were engaged in diverse and complex interactions that spanned multiple communities and broad geographic regions. The concept of a village artisan working in timeless isolation manifest in the writings of Mills, Marx, and other theorists of the Asian state discussed in chapter 3, does not hold up to scrutiny. Nor, as will become clear, do concomitant claims for despotic state authority or the dependence of artisans on royal households.

The second pattern evident in the Vijayanagara data concerns the prominence of households as the primary social units of craft production.

The study of specialized craft production – its emergence, organization, and associated technologies – has a long and esteemed history in archaeological research (see Wailes 1996). Specialized production, of subsistence resources and durable craft goods, has been viewed as a defining characteristic of sociopolitical complexity and its study as key to understanding economic and sociopolitical structures of complex societies (particularly states and empires) and, increasingly, of so-called “egalitarian” societies as well (see Bayman 2002; Mills and Crown 1995; Sassaman 1998; Spielmann 1998, 2002). In complex societies, social, ideological, and occupational differences serve to distinguish among categories of people, and specialized labor becomes a normative means for the production and provisioning of certain categories of subsistence and other goods. States and empires in particular are characterized by a highly elaborated division of labor, based ultimately in the ability of communities or societies to produce subsistence surpluses that can be used to support individuals and communities who do not engage in food production.

Factors underlying the emergence of specialized craft production have been explored by a number of scholars (e.g., Arnold 1976, 1985, 1993; Brown 1989; Childe 1951; Costin 1986; Rice 1981, 1991), and remain a pressing issue in the study of the nature and development of formalized systems of social inequality in human societies. Questions of ultimate origins are not, however, relevant to the study of Vijayanagara. Vijayanagara organization built upon at least 2,000 years of economic and sociopolitical complexity in South India.

The rulers and institutions of Vijayanagara forged a polity that drew on a two-millennium long tradition of state societies in South Asia. Political forms, sacred institutions, complex systems of production and exchange, and social institutions such as guilds and caste organizations all had a lengthy history in southern India, and any study of Vijayanagara must take into account this historical framework. While pre-existing structures did not limit the possibility for change, they did constrain the forms that changes could take and the range of choices available to individual actors and institutions. Like other domains, specialized craft production also had a long history in South India before the emergence of Vijayanagara. Producers belonged to hereditary occupational groups – castes and subcastes – that also carried enormous social and ideological weight. Many of the relations among craft producers and between producers and state institutions, temples, and merchants that we see as characteristic of the Vijayanagara thus had their roots in earlier developments. In this chapter, I present an historical overview of Vijayanagara – its dynastic history, and the political, economic, ideological, and social structures relevant to the study of Vijayanagara-period craft economies.

Throughout the history of the Vijayanagara polity, the territories that the state could claim to rule were far from stable, and often even areas that nominally acknowledged Vijayanagara sovereignty were largely autonomous of its authority.

From the fourth century BC until today, the “traditional Asian state” has occupied a distinctive place in the western imagination. While the location of the Asian other has shifted – from Persia to China and, during the early modern period of European colonial expansion, to India – the idea of Asian polities as distinctive, opposed, and less than, the states of Europe has remained a powerful and pervasive trope for more than two millennia. Through a series of transformations, the idea of oriental tyrants common in classical Greek historical and political thought became incorporated into the political thought of Renaissance Europe, Enlightenment philosophers, and eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British political economists, as well as of Marx, Engels, and their intellectual descendents' models of the “Asiatic Mode of Production.” In the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries, understandings of Asian states and their perceived contrasts with those of Europe became a means through which diverse European social thinkers and philosophers, as well as Asian scholars and political activists, sought to better understand and transform their world. Understandings of the Asian state as despotic with pervasive centrally-controlled economies also made their way into the emergent discipline of archaeology, particularly in the construction of models for the Mesopotamian state (e.g., in the writings of Childe and Wittfogel, see pp. 47–49). These models in turn influenced subsequent archaeological approaches to other early states and empires, including ideas about craft production.

A variety of written and material sources provide evidence for the study of South Indian history, including issues of economy and craft production. Prominent among the written sources are the numerous inscriptions carved on the walls of temples, stelae, and boulders and inscribed on to copper plates. Vijayanagara-period inscriptions were composed primarily in Kannada, Telugu, Tamil, and Sanskrit. Other written sources of the period include diverse South Indian literary works – poetry, temple texts, mythic recountings, and a regrettably small number of administrative documents. We also have written accounts from the northern sultanates and from foreign travelers to South India, including merchants and ministers who visited the Vijayanagara court.

Archaeological remains from fourteenth- to seventeenth-century South India are both abundant and remarkably understudied. We know a great deal about the monumental architecture of the period, particularly temples (see especially Michell 1995). Beyond this, however, systematic archaeological research has been conducted only at the first Vijayanagara capital and in its immediate hinterland, and that only since the 1980s. This work has provided scholars with a detailed understanding of the history and plan of the capital, and of the range of economic and other activities and features in its c. 450-square kilometers fortified hinterland or metropolitan region. In this chapter, I address the various sources of written and archaeological evidence available for the study of Vijayanagara.

Throughout this work, I have examined the nature and organization of fourteenth- through seventeenth-century South Indian craft production from a frame intended to allow broader considerations of the Vijayanagara empire and period. The study of craft production provides a valuable window into questions of state and institutional organization and control, as well as into social life, belief systems, economic structures, and their change over time and variability over space. I have argued that craft production is a social act, and that craft producers and the goods they produce are deeply embedded within broader social, economic, political, and ideological contexts.

The crafting of goods is in a significant sense the crafting of culture. Human experiences and knowledge are shaped and defined by the material world that we inhabit. The spaces we move through, the garments we wear, the ornaments that adorn our bodies, and the tools we use to transform the physical world, are integral to how we define ourselves as individuals and as members of social groups, and to how we perceive and characterize others. Much cultural knowledge based in the material is unquestioned and “embodied,” constituting basic core understandings of the world. Beyond this realm (Bourdieu's habitus; 1977), humans consciously use and manipulate the material world to affect their positions within their social universe. The production and use of goods thus assumes centrality in discussions of social relations, polity, identity, and belief, as well as economy.