Rose Red-Filmed by Any Other Name: Pottery Typology and Genealogy in the Southeastern US

Summary

This is an abstract from the ""Re-excavating" Legacy Collections" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Working with legacy collections, it is common to come across labeled artifacts or reports listing now defunct names. Over the years, archaeologists have chosen to define ceramic assemblages based on any number of attributes; often the primary consideration being the site or region in which they were first discovered and described. These names are time capsules, capturing typological moments in the history of the discipline. Ware types have been devised, revised, split, combined, and ignored. A select few are canonized. Here, I revisit a pottery type collection assembled in the mid-20th century, tracing the sherds and their names back to founding figures and institutions of Southeastern archaeology. The process of reclassification according to modern conventions is an opportunity to examine typological legacies and dead ends, critically examining the naming structures that underlie our analysis and interpretations.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• "Re-excavating" Legacy Collections   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23209