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concerns. For details, see Bagley, “What the Bronzes from Hunyuan Tell Us about the Foundry at Houma,” 214.

89. Bagley, “What the Bronzes from Hunyuan Tell Us about the Foundry at Houma,” 222.

90. Ibid., 221.

91. In this sense, the pattern-bock technique was similar to the “prescriptive” process proposed by Ursula Franklin, composed of a sequence of operations by different specialized groups of workers. According to Franklin, “holistic” and “prescriptive” processes are two different types of organization of production: “the Holistic process is essentially a sequential, linear development” that involves “a single, step-wise approximation toward the final object.” The prescriptive process “can be viewed as a sequence of unit processes,” with each unit representing “an autonomous skill,” and therefore it draws on “different groups of workers.” All technologies at the beginning are holistic, but in sophisticated forms “the operational sequence in a prescriptive technology has been rearranged to increase productivity and efficiency,” whereas “in a holistic technology, the basic production procedure of the craft is more or less preserved” (“The Beginning of Metallurgy in China,” 96–97). See also Franklin, The Real World of Technology, 18–20; Li, “The Anyang Bronze Foundries,” 290.

92. As Bagley discussed, to make the decorated mold section of the frontlet (where the back half of the ornament is flat and plain), moist clay had to be applied—perhaps by constant dipping in slurry—to the finely carved model and detached from it with great care. Disengaging the mold from the model with the sculptural protruding dragons seen in fig. 13 must have been extremely difficult, because the negative impression had to take the design intact in every detail. See Bagley, “Debris from the Houma Foundry,” 51; Bagley, “Anyang Mold-making and the Decorated Model,” 50.

93. Bagley, “Debris from the Houma Foundry,” 58.

94. As Bagley noted, “[Houma craftsmen’s] awesome skill is too easily taken for granted when we see only the finished product and not the means by which it was achieved. The carving on some pieces of the debris is sharper than on the finest bronze, and its effect is not adequately conveyed by even the best photographs” (“Debris from the Houma Foundry,” 58).

95. Of course, the archaeological record is too incomplete to determine whether the Houma founders did not use lost-wax casting; it can only