Pottery, Practice and Provenance. Interpreting Ceramic Data from the Middle Preclassic site of Holtun, Guatemala

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Formal studies of archaeological pottery have moved far beyond traditional typological approaches through applications of complementary instrumental analyses, borrowed mainly from the Natural Sciences. No contemporary study of archaeological pottery is complete without some form of compositional examination, be they chemical or mineralogical, resulting in some plausible identification of material origins – provenance. With a dearth of primary production evidence, interpretations of compositional data rely heavily on a combination of comparative geological information and theoretical bridging arguments to determine if an object can be subjectively characterized as "local". But what is local? What do these compositional signals actually represent? In this paper we consider that manufactured objects, such as pottery, are the results of human behavior influenced through cultural, environmental and material constraints. Through reconstructing culturally informed technological systems of production in pottery assemblages at the site of Holtun, Guatemala, we are able to identify, characterize and compare discrete practices associated with specific production units in Middle Preclassic lowlands.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Where Is Provenance? Bridging Method, Evidence, and Theory for the Interpretation of Local Production   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 24843