Pottery Production and Community Practices: Haudenosaunee in Central New York

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper focuses on the practices of potters within several communities in central New York State. This area was occupied during late prehistoric/early historic times and abandoned shortly after contact when populations were consolidating in greater numbers in neighboring regions. Occupants at two of these sites (Parker Farm and Carman) were engaged in subsistence and production activities, but with different emphases. Pottery production was more intensively practiced at the former site, while manufacture and trade in shell beads was evident at the latter. Previous efforts at detailed pottery analysis have been thwarted by the extensive fragmentation of pot sherds and avocational collection activities. These have posed methodological challenges for the comparative analyses of these and several nearby sites with the aim of identifying communities of practice associated with one of these activities, the production of pottery. For this analysis, attribute analysis of incomplete rim sherds suggests the presence of community practices for rim formation, design placement, design elements, and partial motifs. Comparisons between these sites and others with complete rims illustrate the potential and challenges of this approach.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25660