Shaping Pots and Minds: Ceramic Experimental Archaeology in an Undergraduate Classroom

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The study of archaeological ceramics has relied on a reconstruction of the techno-functional choices made by potters in the past through a chaîne opératoire approach. However, the insights gained through this analysis have largely confused or eluded our students due to a lack of practical experience with ceramic manufacture. In the fall of 2023, faculty in anthropology and art at Lyon College collaborated to create a course that provided students with a hands-on experience in the ceramic production process from the gathering of raw materials to firing to vessel use. The expressed archaeological goal of the course was for students to be able to better understand the technological and functional decisions that potters made in the production process through experimentation. We also aimed to demystify the production of the material world by engaging in the complete chain of ceramic manufacture. This paper briefly presents the course structure and evaluates the efficacy of our experimental design in increasing technical and functional understanding of archaeological ceramic materials. More importantly, we highlight the lessons that we learned from our students in this shared experience.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Experimental Pedagogies: Teaching through Experimental Archaeology Part 1   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38470.0