Understanding La Playa through 2,000 Years of Ceramic Production and Exchange

Summary

This is an abstract from the "13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ceramics blanket La Playa’s vast landscape and include some of the earliest pottery produced in the Southwest/Northwest. Despite its high frequency and value for reconstructing occupational histories, there has been no synthetic discussion of La Playa’s ceramics. This presentation chronologically frames the site’s 2,000 years ceramic presence by exploring questions of nascent pottery production, distribution of trade wares, and regional precolonial ceramic variability. The value of La Playa’s ceramics is particularly important for reconstructing Trincheras tradition chronology (~400–1450 CE) and has recently contributed to the first seriation of its ceramics. This seriation demonstrates that a locally produced ceramic type, La Playa Purple-on-brown, was among the earliest decorated ceramics produced in the Southwest/Northwest and served as a progenitor for over eight centuries of local decorated pottery production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• 13,000 Years of Adaptation in the Sonoran Desert at La Playa, Sonora   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38206.0