Craft Traditions (In book: The Oxford Handbook of Cultural Evolution (pp.C40P1-C40N2))

Craft traditions are some of the most durable of human institutions, preserving and transmitting knowledge and skills related to material culture. Their study has relevance to a range of disciplines, including archaeology, art history, and the history of technology. From an evolutionary perspective, they offer the opportunity to study culture at a range of scales, from the behaviours of individual craftspeople to broad-scale patterns of culture, and they are an important testing ground for theoretical models of how culture evolves.