Thirst for Knowledge: Teaching Typology and Social Organization through the Stylistic Attributes of Water Bottles

Summary

Residents of Grand Junction, Colorado must necessarily adapt to the arid, high-elevation climate of the northern Colorado Plateau. One highly visible adaptation to aridity is the personal transport of potable liquids in an array of vessels. Such vessels are ubiquitous among Colorado Mesa University students, staff and faculty, and they provide a readily accessible source of data with which to illustrate the uses of typology, style and the material correlates of social organization. In a multi-week project, introductory archaeology students are challenged to discern patterns in water bottle use among their classmates and professors. They first create a water bottle typology, and later document style through the presence of appliqués and other decorative features. Finally, students collect basic demographic data on bottle owners. With these data in hand, students are then tasked with finding correlations between certain bottle types and particular groups of people, whether certain decorative aspects correspond to sex/gender, and whether “exotic” bottles are somehow special. From a pedagogical perspective, highlighting items students themselves use and decorate makes it easier to explain concepts that might seem esoteric when using more traditional archaeological examples.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 81st Annual Meeting, Orlando, FL (2016)   •
• Teaching Archaeology: Highlights from the Committee on Curriculum and the Teaching Archaeology Interest Group

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