Tracing Purpose: An emic view of pottery making in prehistory and beyond

Summary

Archaeologists have, until recently, tended to study pots in what I view as an outside/in or etic manner. We have looked at size, form, decoration and touched on the manner of making only insofar as a pot being hand-built, wheel-thrown or cast. However, by developing a profoundly emic understanding of potting, as performance, we have a tool that can allow us to to view the entirely social and shifting cultural nature of a particular genre of pots. In 2007 I developed a skill methodology that has been used successfully on a number of European prehistoric assemblages. In 2015 the methodology was applied to the indigenous pottery of Taiwan, including that of the Paiwan. I will discuss the results of this research and what I believe it reveals about the shifting social nature of this pottery genre and what this may mean for an understanding of prehistoric pottery in Taiwan.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)   •
• Archaeology of Cultural Fluidity in Taiwan

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 14317