Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies

This collection contains the abstracts of the papers presented in the session entitled "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In the Andean and Amazonian regions, ceramic studies play a prominent role in the definition of ancient societies and their relationships, although a large part of this research was mainly focused on typological studies to build the current chronocultural sequences. Nonetheless, over the last decades ceramic technological studies have become more and more significant and now encompass a wide range of approaches such as archaeometric analyses to determine the composition of pastes and pigments, and the provenance of the materials; experimental research and ethnoarchaeological studies to create comparative frames of reference; or works based on the study of the macroscopic and microscopic traces of manufacture to define the methods and techniques of shaping. But what these analyses have in common is their attempt to switch from a more traditional morphostylistic description of pottery to an understanding of the identity of potters and the social, economic, cultural, and political contexts in which they were involved. This session brings together experts in Andean and Amazonian ceramic technology to discuss research and recent advances in this field and account for the diversity of theoretical and methodological approaches and the sociocultural issues that can be addressed from these studies.