Networks of Embodied Practice: Personhood, the Body, and Potting Skill in the North American Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Archaeologists over the last two decades have become increasingly interested in the relationship between personhood and the human body. Bodily engagement with the material world can create and reproduce different kinds of social understandings, and is a means by which persons make subjectivity durable, transmissible, and experiential. While case studies of personhood have generally been beneficial for the field of archaeology, few have focused on how differences in skill level impact social categorization. For instance, part-time potters may not self-identify specifically as “potters.” Conversely, specialized mortuary potters that received years, perhaps decades, of hands-on training are much more likely to identify with their craft. We use metrics of potting consistency to evaluate differences in skill from Late Woodland (ca. AD 650–1050) and Mississippian (ca. AD 1050–1550) mortuary contexts in the Tampa Bay region. We also employ petrography and neutron activation analysis (NAA) to identify where across the southeastern landscape these differences in skill occurred. We argue that while specialized mortuary potters were present during both the Late Woodland and Mississippian periods, they put their skill to use for different purposes due to changes in social networks, and thus became fundamentally different kinds of social subjects.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography   •
• Society for American Archaeology 86th Annual Meeting, Online (2021)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 32456