Itinerancy and pottery production in the Andes

Summary

Swallows are a type of potter that travels seasonally to places away from their “home base” to practice their craft. For more than a century, and, in several parts of the world, ethnographers have documented this phenomenon, however, archaeologists have only addressed it tangentially. Yet swallows are important for archaeologists to consider, since they demonstrate that cultural interaction is not always limited to the distribution of pottery, but can also be important during the manufacturing stage. Based on fieldwork in more than thirty communities with potters, this paper will characterize the cyclically migrant potters of the Peruvian Andes emphasizing them as agents of transformation in material culture. Six varieties of Andean swallows will be presented. These varieties will be explained within a regional map of technical styles (aka manufacturing styles), considering their tools, their sources of raw materials, and their routes. These features will then be discussed in relation to analogous archaeological evidence to suggest how technical styles and pottery workshops may be used to trace cultural interaction.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• E pur si muove: Exploring Mobilities in Latin America

Keywords

Spatial Coverage