Identifying Potting Traditions from the Nashville Basin through Ceramic Petrography

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper aims to investigate ceramic manufacturing in the Nashville Basin of Tennessee during the Mississippian period (AD 1000–1500) at the macroscopic and microscopic levels. Our vessel lot and petrographic studies analyze 73 shell-tempered pottery sherds from seven Middle Cumberland archaeological sites. We utilize form and function information, point-counting data, and qualitative observations in thin-section to examine the chain of operations used to create these vessels. While this study aims to investigate the entire chaîne opératoire, it emphasizes paste preparation. We use these data to compare the steps of ceramic craft production between sites and aim to define local and regional potting traditions. Our results suggest that production steps were often consistent between sites, but recipes varied both over the centuries of the Mississippian time period and across the Middle Cumberland River drainage in Tennessee.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37259.0