Decorating Glaze-Painted Pottery in East-Central Arizona (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Dynamics in the Southwest, AD 1250-1680
The demographic upheavals that altered the social landscape of the Southwest from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries forced peoples from diverse backgrounds to literally remake their worlds—transformations in community, identity, and power that are only beginning to be understood through innovations in decorated ceramics. In addition to aesthetic changes that included new color schemes, new painting techniques, alterations in design, and a greater emphasis on iconographic imagery, some of the wares reflect a new production efficiency resulting from more specialized household and community-based industries. Also, they were traded over longer distances and were used more often in public ceremonies than earlier ceramic types. Through the study of glaze-painted pottery, archaeologists are beginning to understand that pots had “social lives” in this changing world and that careful reconstruction of the social lives of pots can help us understand the social lives of Puebloan peoples. In this book, fifteen contributors apply a wide range of technological and stylistic analysis techniques to pottery of the Rio Grande and Western Pueblo areas to show what it reveals about inter- and intra-community dynamics, work groups, migration, trade, and ideology in the precontact and early postcontact Puebloan world. Through material evidence, the contributors reveal that technological and aesthetic innovations were deliberately manipulated and disseminated to actively construct “communities of practice” that cut across language and settlement groups. The Social Life of Pots offers a wealth of new data from this crucial period of prehistory and is an important baseline for future work in this area.
The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Transformation in the Late Precontact Southwest edited by J. A. Habicht-Mauche, S. L. Eckert and D. Huntley, 2006
The demographic upheavals that altered the social landscape of the Southwest from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries forced peoples from diverse backgrounds to literally remake their worlds—transformations in community, identity, and power that are only beginning to be understood through innovations in decorated ceramics. In addition to aesthetic changes that included new color schemes, new painting techniques, alterations in design, and a greater emphasis on iconographic imagery, some of the wares reflect a new production efficiency resulting from more specialized household and community-based industries. Also, they were traded over longer distances and were used more often in public ceremonies than earlier ceramic types. Through the study of glaze-painted pottery, archaeologists are beginning to understand that pots had “social lives” in this changing world and that careful reconstruction of the social lives of pots can help us understand the social lives of Puebloan peoples. In this book, fifteen contributors apply a wide range of technological and stylistic analysis techniques to pottery of the Rio Grande and Western Pueblo areas to show what it reveals about inter- and intra-community dynamics, work groups, migration, trade, and ideology in the precontact and early postcontact Puebloan world. Through material evidence, the contributors reveal that technological and aesthetic innovations were deliberately manipulated and disseminated to actively construct “communities of practice” that cut across language and settlement groups. The Social Life of Pots offers a wealth of new data from this crucial period of prehistory and is an important baseline for future work in this area.
The peoples of the American Southwest during the 13th through the 17th centuries witnessed dramatic changes in settlement size, exchange relationships, ideology, social organization, and migrations that included those of the first European settlers. Concomitant with these world-shaking events, communities of potters began producing new kinds of wares—particularly polychrome and glaze-paint decorated pottery—that entailed new technologies and new materials. The contributors to this volume present results of their collaborative research into the production and distribution of these new wares, including cutting-edge chemical and petrographic analyses. They use the insights gained to reflect on the changing nature of communities of potters as they participated in the dynamic social conditions of their world.
Kiva, 2022
The Tijeras Pueblo Ceramics Project was designed to explore how the origin and spread of glaze-painted pottery and technology among the Ancestral Eastern Pueblos of the middle Rio Grande was associated with inter-regional macro-scale social processes, such as immigration, population aggregation, and coalescent community formation during the Pueblo IV period in the American Southwest (AD 1275-1425). However, carbon-painted black-on-white ceramics make up over half of the decorated pottery from Tijeras Pueblo and these white wares have their own unique story to tell. In particular, this article argues that the diversity of traits that characterize local carbon painted black-on-white pottery was directly associated with the context in which novice potters learned to make pots, how technological practices were transmitted and regulated within these communities of practice, and how such practices were related to strategies of coalescence and identity formation around the turn of the fourteenth century.
Journal of Anthropological Archaeology
The advent of glaze-painted ceramics by Ancestral Pueblo peoples in the US Southwest occurred during an important period of cultural change. In east-central Arizona, potters used glaze-paints to decorate a striking, representational-style pottery during the early fourteenth-century AD. We evaluate the possibility that these vessels were manufactured by emergent specialists who possessed crafting-knowledge that was not widely shared with others in their communities. Time of flight-laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (TOF-LA-ICP-MS) was used to characterize the composition of a large sample of red ware sherds from sites in the Silver Creek area. This analytical approach precisely measures the chemical composition of paints, which can then be used to model ancient technological ‘‘recipes.’’ Our study highlights the complexities of craft production in small-scale societies and the utility of practice-based versus typological approaches to specialization.
reflects diverse analytical approaches and methodological strategies for examining the role of glaze \vare pottery in the social lives of the late precontact and early contact Pueblos. By tracing the circulation of spe cialized knowledge, raw materials, and the glaze-painted pots themselves, through interactive networks of varying sizes and scales, these researchers reveal how glaze ware production, distribution, and use articulated with a variety of dynamic historical and social processes, including migration, community formation, constructions of local and regional identity, inter comlTIunity interaction and alliance, organization of production, and the proliferation of new religious systems and ritual practices. What is emerg ing from these studies is a diverse and complementary series of local "so cial histories" of the glaze \vares that allow us to track both similarities and differences in how these articulations played out in different times, places, and contexts across the late precontact and early contact South west. Finally, by comparing and contrasting these diverse social histories, we hope to move toward a more synthetic understanding of the mutually constitutive relationships that linked material culture, technological prac tice, and the complex processes of social formation and culture change.
PAINTED POTTERY: ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
Navajo Mountain Road Project final report (Vol. 5, p. Chapter 3). onine publication: University of Utah Press. , 2008
This chapter presents an analysis of painted bowl rim sherds undertaken to infer relationships between whiteware and orangeware vessels and their producers, and to address craft specialization, exchange, migration, and aggregation in the northern Kayenta region. Analysis focuses on stylistic similarities and differences between Tusayan White Ware and contemporaneous Tsegi Orange Ware. A final section attempts to explain the predominance of redware bowls and whiteware jars in the late Pueblo II to middle Pueblo III period via symbolic interpretation. Based on burial assemblages that included pottery-making tools and unfired pottery, in the Kayenta area proper, Beals et al. (1945) suggested that Kayenta potters produced both orangeware and whiteware vessels. They studied about 50,000 sherds and vessels from more than 500 sites investigated by the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley Expedition in and near Tsegi Canyon in the 1930s. Their ceramic seriation validated the use of Colton and Hargrave's 1937 typology for answering basic questions about chronology and cultural affiliation. They created no new types, but conflated some (such as Betatakin Black-on-white with Tusayan Black-on-white). Nonetheless, they saw a need to examine vessel form and painted pottery decoration in more detail than typological categories provide. In the course of their research, they examined whole vessels in museum collections in addition to ones collected by their expedition. Detailed study of design styles suggested to them that orangeware and whiteware styles were somewhat similar in the Pueblo II period, and highly distinct in the Pueblo III period. Pueblo III orangeware decoration seemed to evolve out of Pueblo II whiteware styles, but Pueblo III whiteware styles seemed to reflect an imported tradition, perhaps, they speculated, from the Flagstaff area. The N16 project attempts to build on the solid foundation left by the Rainbow Bridge-Monument Valley analyses. We have fewer reconstructible vessels to work with, so we focused on rim sherds. Due to time and resource constraints, we initially focused on bowl forms. Our results corroborate those of Beals et al. in many ways but identify some differences between the Kayenta heartland and the Navajo Mountain area, and make some limited comparisons with the western and eastern Mesa Verde areas. We expand on their interpretations by drawing on cross-media comparison (with textiles and baskets), recent studies in ceramic ethnoarchaeology, classic ethnographies, and metaphor theory. RESEARCH QUESTIONS Our first goal was to find out how much variation in rim form is patterned in time to assess the possibility of using bowl rim form for microseriation to help refine site chronologies. Several researchers have demonstrated some success with microstyle chronology of Mesa Verde White Ware (Hegmon 1991) and Mimbres area (Shafer and Brewington 1995) decorated ceramics. LaMotta (2002) has used banding and framing lines on Jeddito Yellow Ware and Winslow Orange Ware bowls to develop a temporal sequence for the Homol'ovi area. Unfortunately, only one N16 project site with an adequate ceramic sample yielded tree-ring dates, and relative chronological placement of assemblages remains imprecise. While we can use ceramic data to suggest relative dates and even date ranges for sites and components, we cannot test this sequence against absolute dates. Therefore, we focused our stylistic analyses on other questions. Second, we wished to know whether the pattern inferred by Beals et al. (1945) for the Tsegi Canyon area holds true in the Navajo Mountain area. Were whiteware and orangeware bowls more likely to have been made by the same potters working with different materials and firing technologies, as in the Tsegi Canyon-Kayenta area? Were these two wares produced by different groups of potters in different areas who then exchanged whiteware for orangeware, and vice versa? Or does some combination of trade and local production account for observed patterns? Examination of materials (Chapter 2) suggests that potters selected different materials (iron-rich vs. iron-poor clay, crushed sherd vs. sand temper, and mineral vs. organic paints) and employed different firing techniques to make whiteware and orangeware
2015
The research presented here focuses on Santa Fe Black-on-white pottery produced during the Late Coalition/Early Classic Transition (AD 1250e1350) in the northern Rio Grande region, New Mexico. We combine design data with compositional analyses to gain a greater understanding of ceramic production and circulation in this region and to evaluate the communities of practice and communities of identity reflected in pottery.We combine mineralogical and INAA chemical compositional datasets to argue for at least three production provenances; we further argue that nine potential petrofacies represent different resource procurement zones within the production provenances. We argue that these data, combined, represent a minimum of three different communities of practice. Despite multiple communities of practice, similar designs were being used as decoration that reflects a single community of identity. We argue that during this transitional time period examined here, producers of Santa Fe Black-on-white were intentionally practicing a form of identity maintenance across all of the villages in which it was produced.
Communities of Practice in the Early Pottery Traditions of the American Southeast
The oldest pottery traditions of the southeastern United States include a series of punctated wares geographically clustered in three locales of the Savannah River region. Although potters in each locale decorated and used pots in virtually identical fashion, they tempered clays and formed vessels in appreciably different ways. Situated learning theory offers a framework for interpreting these divergent trends in early pottery by focusing attention on the multiple communities of practice in which potters participated. Independent data on the handedness of potters supports the inference that techniques for making pottery were transmitted cognately, whereas decorative expression and methods of cooking crosscut residential units as a result of affinal relations. Potential contradictions arising from different types and changing forms of community membership may have contributed to radical changes in pottery technology and decoration after some fifteen generations of relative stability.