Tafelmaier, Y., Bataille, G., Schmid, V., Taller, A., Will, M. (2020). Der Chaîne opératoire-Ansatz. In: Methoden zur Analyse von Steinartefakten. essentials. Springer Spektrum, Wiesbaden. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-30570-3_4
Zusammenfassung
Beim Chaîne opératoire-Ansatz geht es darum, durch das Heranziehen der Gesamtheit eines Steinartefaktinventars die verschiedenen Stufen von der Rohmaterialbeschaffung über Grundformproduktion, Werkzeugfertigung und Recycling bis hin zum Verwerfen nachzuvollziehen. Damit können einerseits Aussagen zur zeitlichen Abfolge sowie Gestaltung und andererseits zur räumlichen Organisation der Operationskette (chaîne opératoire) getroffen werden. Dabei wird davon ausgegangen, dass die Steinartefaktherstellungsweise als kognitives Projekt entsteht, das auf intellektueller Ebene in ein konzeptuelles Schema umgewandelt wird, welches schließlich durch eine Reihe von Aktivitäten, das operative Schema, konkretisiert wird. Dieses Kapitel erläutert den forschungsgeschichtlichen Hintergrund sowie die methodischen Grundlagen und gibt abschließend Beispiele zur Anwendung.
(2020) Thinking with Diagrams: The Chaîne Opératoire and the Transmission of Technical Knowledge in Chinese Agricultural Texts, East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 14:2, 199-223, DOI: 10.1215/18752160-8538106
Abstract
Diagrams make wonderful templates for technical action. It follows that for scholars of science and technology they are both an object and a tool of study. The author explores this relationship in the first part of the article, focusing on one particularly effective format for communicating or retrieving complicated technological sequences: the chaîne opératoire, or procedural sequence. Today we usually think of a diagram as a graphic, but diagrammatic thinking is also frequently expressed in other forms, including text or hybrids of graphics and text. To illustrate this, the author compares the formulation and use of chaînes opératoires in two canonical Chinese agricultural treatises. The Qimin yaoshu (Essential Techniques for the Common People) by Jia Sixie, completed ca. 540 CE, was composed before printing was available and makes no use of graphics. The Nongshu (Agricultural Treatise) of 1313, authored by Wang Zhen, was published using woodblock print, a medium that facilitated Wang’s copious use of graphics. The comparison between these classic treatises invites reflection on how the material techniques of inscription available to an author might influence their diagrammatic thinking. But the chaîne opératoire is good to think with at a more general level too. For historians, the matches or discrepancies between the chaîne opératoire they might draw up to map a technical operation, and the versions that they find in historical sources, suggest ways to think both about technology as a total social fact, and about differences between cultures of communication.
Thomas Gobbitt (2014) Codicological Features of a Late-Eleventh-Century Manuscript of the Lombard Laws, Studia Neophilologica, 86:sup1, 48-67, DOI: 10.1080/00393274.2013.853899
Abstract
This article comprises a detailed codicological case study of the production and manuscript contexts of Vienna, Österreichische Nationalbibliothek MS Cod. 471, a late-eleventh-century Italian witness of the early-medieval Lombard, Frankish and Saxon laws known and edited as the Liber Legis Langobardorum or Liber Papiensis. Elements of the chaîne opératoire and contextual dynamics of the manuscript’s production are re-constructed and used to reflect on the general contexts of both book production and the re-contextualising of the barbarian laws in the late eleventh century. I argue that the stratigraphy of the manuscript’s production and use demonstrates scribal engagement with the book extending beyond passive copying of the legal text to actively restructuring the material form of the manuscript, and thereby reimagining and directing the ways in which a potential reader could and should interact with the laws. The materiality of the book, as much as of the texts of the Liber Legis Langobardorum and Walcausina that it contained, were reinvented to suit the needs and understandings of the community for whom it was produced and used, and in relation to the broader developing contexts of literate and legal culture in late-eleventh-century Europe.
