Standardization and Variability of Decorated and Undecorated Pottery Vessels from Angel Mounds, Indiana

Summary

At the Mississippian site of Angel Mounds (12Vg1), people crafted both plain, utilitarian-appearing vessels, and a variety of highly decorated wares, including Negative Painted plates that are frequently associated with the site. Previous researchers have suggested that Negative Painted vessels were made by ceramic or ritual specialists, who were perhaps sponsored by a chief or other elite individual. These decorated vessels are indeed rare at Angel Mounds, but no evidence has been found to suggest they were made in workshops or in elite-controlled areas such as on mound surfaces. Standardization (as seen in the lack of diversity of manufacturing attributes) is a form of indirect evidence archaeologists frequently use to evaluate production type and degree of specialization or skill of the producer, with the assumption that specialized potters develop skill over their lifetimes, and their products thus become more standardized in appearance than those made by non-specialists. In this paper, I present results of a recent study examining the variability of several vessel manufacturing variables across whole undecorated and decorated vessels from Angel Mounds. The goal of this research was to address the question: are decorated pots more standardized within and between vessels than undecorated pots at Angel Mounds?

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage