From One Jar, Many Selves

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Red-on-Natural jars, characterized by nearly identical forms and decorations, were used by people of all ranks who lived in the adjoining Naco, middle Chamelecon, and lower Cacaulapa valleys of northwest Honduras from CE 600–1000. These vessels’ ubiquity suggests that those who used them participated in a community of practice that transcended the realms centered on each of the three basins. The different techniques and resources used to shape, fire, and decorate these containers, however, constituted multiple distinct communities of practice enacted in the ceramic workshops operating in each of the valleys. We draw on fieldwork conducted within these production locales together with INAA, petrographic, XRF, and LA-ICP-MS analyses of 424 sherd and clay samples to describe these production-based communities of practice. The research highlights the many ways that social identities can be instantiated as people make and use even very similar items in regularly recurring routines. It also stresses the importance of attending to the contexts of use and manufacture through which we come to know ourselves as we manipulate things.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Ceramics and Archaeological Sciences 2024

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37849.0