Molding Community: Compositional Insights into the Organization of Mississippian Pottery Production on the Central Gulf Coast of Florida, USA

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Technological innovations can have profound social consequences. Alterations to a given potting network change the pacing and tempo of interactions between experts and apprentices, effectively restructuring intergenerational relationships within a community. For this reason, experienced potters may intentionally resist new technologies to keep active the social bonds that depend on a specific organization of production. This study mobilizes technological and compositional analyses to investigate the social implications of shifting from coiled to molded pottery production during the Mississippian transition in Tampa Bay, Florida. The primary empirical observations of this research are: 1) the presence of chromium-enriched clays in domestic pottery after AD 1050 signaled increasing reliance on a restricted range of clay resources, and 2) certain optical patterns in thin section identify a form of pottery production predicated on the use of concave molds. We argue that molding was a comparatively expedient technique that broadened participation in domestic potting and eliminated certain steps in the socialization process. Ultimately, patterns gleaned from this work suggest that the expansion of molded pottery paralleled the development of kinship systems predicated on the vertical transmission of property, fundamentally reorganizing relationships between generations of potters and communities in this segment of the Mississippian world.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38356.0