Being and Becoming: Learning, Skill, and Cognition as Exhibited on Painted White Ware Pottery at Sand Canyon Pueblo (5MT765), a Pueblo III Era Community Center in Southwestern Colorado

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

This paper reports on the presenter's master's thesis research which examined painted white ware vessels from the Sand Canyon Pueblo site using an adapted 18-point attribute analysis developed by Patricia Crown for determining the age and skill level of producers of painted designs of pre-Hispanic southwestern ceramics. The thesis attempted to understand if a theorized "container metaphor" was taught by adults and learned by children by 1) verifying if the attribute analysis could be used to find "child" and "adult" pots, and 2) comparing the application of design motifs between the two categories. This paper will focus on the results of the thesis which demonstrate that childhood production can be theorized using the attribute analysis with other lines of deduction. The results further show that the attribute analysis can be usefully employed to assess a range of skills not necessarily related to youth production, as it is demonstrated that relative levels of exhibited skill in painting are tied to specific vessel forms. This paper will also discuss how the categorization between the Mesa Verde Black-on-White and McElmo Black-on-White Pueblo III pottery types may result from an implicit recognition by archaeologists of relative applied skill level.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2023: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 88th Annual Meeting, Portland, OR (2023)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36621.0