Ceramic Ecology as Deep Ecology in Northern New Mexico

Summary

"This landscape is animate: it moves, transposes, builds, proceeds, shifts, always going on, never coming back, and one can only retain it in vignettes, impressions caught in a flash."

—Ann Zwinger, Downcanyon

We might think of ceramics as landscape "caught in a flash", a bringing together of different geological places into newly combined forms. Ecological thinking in Northern Rio Grande Pueblos frames this bringing together as a fluid gathering of forces that flow in and out of one another. "Deep ecology" is one current term the social sciences for this relational field of human and non-human interaction in the landscape— for Pueblo potters, it is how the world is.

This paper outlines a deep ecology of pottery from a Spanish land grant community and a neighboring Tiwa Pueblo. I present ongoing research on the composition of ceramics from these two places, a study that gives insight into how different communities engaged with the landscape. Comparative ceramic ecology offers a framework for thinking about historical relationships that includes but also moves beyond questions of ethnicity and identity to a focus on how people locate themselves within socio-environmental systems.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 20294