A Clean Break: A Departure from Standard Typologies through an Investigation of Pottery Temper at Joshua Tree National Park

Summary

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

This poster will focus on my current master’s research and is in joint partnership between the University of New Mexico, Joshua Tree National Park, and the descendant communities from the California Desert. The project developed through consultation with the Twenty-Nine Palms Band of Mission Indians, the San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, and Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians. These consultations resulted in the research questions being pursued; questions that tribal consultants felt would be most useful and relevant to them. The overarching goal of the project is to create identifiable groups for the pottery found in Joshua Tree National Park. Over the years, a number of different scholars have attempted to create pottery typologies for this area. The results of these studies have yielded confusing, often contradictory descriptions of the pottery and generally unhelpful guides. The typology generated as a part of my master’s project will help standardize pottery recording by park and tribal archaeologists to attempt to better connect descendant communities with use areas in the park. This project differs from past attempts to create typologies in this area by focusing on the compositional makeup of the sherds through both binocular and petrographic analysis.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 36854.0