Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Over the last two decades, ceramic petrography has played an integral role in deciphering the social networks associated with past pottery production and exchange. Pots themselves are the outcome of individual or collaborative practices governed by larger social bodies. While the burgeoning literature on communities of practice and technological style has made use of pottery analyses, we argue that the benefits of ceramic petrography to this kind of research have not been fully realized. Point-counting specifically provides information on tempering and forming techniques that were often mediated by kinship, marriage, and identity. Provenance data serve as evidence of object exchange that followed the contours of political and religious movements. At root, these insights share common ground; they tell us how pottery making was informed by specific kinds of relationships that existed between potters and larger social networks. The case studies presented here use a variety of techniques within ceramic petrography to decipher these relationships. Our goal is to showcase through diachronic, cross-cultural analyses the utility of using all aspects of petrographic analysis to better characterize past potting networks. We ultimately use these case studies to demonstrate how social archaeology can benefit by employing a multifaceted petrographic approach.