Year: 2018
Type: book-chapter
Abstract: IntroductionThis paper focuses on the logistics of preindustrial construction and the potential for a comparative method.A comparative method is advocated here due to the proliferation of isolated approaches that have led to false equivalencies in labour costs.Simply put, future labour studies would benefit from a quick-reference guide of task rates, and this paper aims to jump-start that process with the least problematic-and most prominently reported-task rates in manual earthmoving.Labour or task rates are combined with the dimensions of a built feature in a process known as architectural energetics, a phrase coined by Elliot Abrams in the 1980s to describe a concept recorded since at least the Early Dynastic Period (2900-2350 B.C.E.): the measuring of construction output or potential via time and personnel required.493 Energetics in its current form offers labour time estimates for past construction, which authors globally have stretched into models of demography and power.494 One major challenge to the validity of energetics has been the use of single task rates, which, depending on the source, can skew the picture of the past that archaeologists attempt to sketch through interpretative models based on labour predictions.Labour predictions falter foremost in selecting appropriate task rates for modelling simplified acts or stages of construction, such as digging a ditch, shaping a wooden post, or setting a stone block into place.Since task rates dictate construction efficiency, arbitrary selection of rates yields arbitrary results: useful for thought exercises and isolated case studies but not for posterity and progress in empirical labour methods.While both adherents and opponents of architectural energetics have already written at length on its advantages and limitations, a summary of the consensus suffices here.Although actual rates from prehistory are inevitably lost without direct recording, pre-493
Author: David Reuben Turner
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2948479751