gems, beads, agate, carnelian, lapidary arts, cutting, Cambay, India, Khambhat, Indian lapidary

At present, the city of Khambhat in western India is one of the largest stone beadworking centers in the world, and it has been an important hub for over two thousand years of documented history (Arkell 1936; Trivedi 1964). Archaeological evidence traces the region’s stone bead industry back even earlier, to the cities and villages of the Harappan Phase of the Indus Tradition, dated to around 2500 BC (Hegde et al. 1988; Kenoyer 1986; Rao 1973). Due to the long continuity of stone beadmaking, Khambhat offers a unique opportunity to study the organization of a specialized craft and to understand how social, economic, and political structures relating to such crafts might be reflected in the archaeological record. In archaeological studies of urbanism and so-called “complex societies,” craft specialization has become a major indicator of socio-economic complexity, stratification, and centralized control; however, the many varying definitions of specialized crafts and differing interpretations of their role in prehistoric societies have led scholars to call for more reliable interpretive models that can better correlate socio-economic aspects of specialized crafts with artifact patterns in the archaeological record (Tosi 1984; Vidale 1989; Kenoyer 1989).