10 Ritual Craft Specialists in Middle Range Societies Katherine A. Spielmann Arizona State University ABSTRACT This chapter focuses on the social identity of specialists who produced items used in ritual contexts in prehistoric middle range societies. After introducing two prehistoric case studies (Mimbres and Ohio Hopewell) that illustrate the range of productive scale for ritual crafts, ethnographic case studies (Iroquois and Northwest Coast) are discussed to provide more detail on the social identities of ritual craft specialists. It is concluded that artistic skill, regardless of social status, is the primary criterion for the production of ritual icons in many middle range societies. In contexts in which ritual knowledge is critical in status-building, however, the ritual practitioners themselves are likely to be the ritual craft specialists. INTRODUCTION This chapter concerns the specialists who pro- duced items used in ritual contexts in prehistoric middle range societies. My interest in these special- ists derives from the importance of what has been termed the "ritual mode of production" (Rappaport 1984:410) in the economies of such societies. De- cades ago Firth (1950) documented the relationship between ritual performance and economic activity. He also noted, however, that "...there is little sys- tematic attempt to analyze the effects of the perfor- mance of the ritual upon the organization of the work, and upon volume of production" (Firth 1950:168). More recently Friedman (1975) has dis- cussed the importance of religious activities as stimuli to economic activity. And Richard Bradley (1991) has gone so far as to argue that the demands of Late Neolithic ceremonial activity, including the use of craft items, were so extreme in Britain, that they outstripped the productive capacity of the environ- ment. Despite the apparent importance of ritual production in the development of craft specializa- tion in middle range societies, it is seldom an explicit focus of analysis. It is common in the recent literature on craft specialization to distinguish between independent and attached specialists, attached specialists being under- written by the elite of a society. In the case of ritual production, we encounter a situation that in some cases may combine elements of both categories, in that an independent specialist may be "attached" to (or "embedded in," see Ames 1995:158) the ritual context, rather than to a particular class of people. In other words, demands of ritual performance may underwrite the specialized production of esoteric, intricate, skillfully made items. Because these items were used in ritual con- texts, they are likely to have held considerable spiri- tual power, making ritual crafts somewhat distinct from crafts used in secular contexts. It is possible, for example, that the creation of powerful icons required special restrictions on who the craftsperson was or how production was carried out. More- over, in some cases, making the ritual craft could have been an expression of the spiritual power pos- sessed by certain members of society (see below). Another possibility is that ritual practitioners may have sought to control the production of ritually important items as a means of acquiring and main-