On the archaeology of traditional industry

Abstract The term “archaeology of traditional industry” refers to the archaeological researches on all of the processing, manufacturing and mining industries before the occurrence of the modern Industrial Revolution. The putting forward of this concept has profound backgrounds of theory and time. The traditional industry had very diversified specialties, which could be classified into 25 categories. The researches on the archaeology of traditional industry mainly include the materials, tools and apparatuses, techniques and operation sequences, products, the circulation and consumption of products, producers, methods of producing and managing, industrial distribution and structure, social economy and social culture, in total the contents of these ten aspects; the research methods mainly include basic archaeological methods, multi-disciplinary cooperative researches and multi-perspective researches, etc.