Ceramic Sociology Revisited: Ceramic Design Analysis in the Sand Canyon Locality

Summary

Tracing complicated social links such as kinship through the material record has fallen in and out of favor in anthropological discourse. The ceramic sociologists of the 1960s and 1970s (Hill 1966; Longacre 1970) focused on tracking kinship through spatial patterning of ceramic designs among Pueblo sites in the American Southwest. The concept of ceramic sociology sparked many critiques within archaeology (Allen and Richardson 1971). These critiques were tied to a need for better understanding of formation processes, proper and accurate classifications of ceramic designs and the degree to which social organization such as, kinship can be identified. The issues raised by the ceramic sociologists are important and deserve a solution, or at the very least a conversation. Kinship studies in anthropology have reemerged allowing this research to address the critiques previously leveled at ceramic sociologists. Analyzing style data from ceramics at the Sand Canyon locality in southwest Colorado, the issue of proper and accurate classifications of ceramic design are revisited in the application of the conceptual metaphor theory. Formation processes and kinship construction are addressed through ethnographic and linguistic studies providing a reworked commentary on material culture patterns correlated to kinship relations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16919