Animate Pottery and Culture Phases

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

If pottery was animate in past cultures, does this not beg the question how would these powers, central to magical technologies, contribute to creation of archaeological phases? Archaeologists generally struggle to explain rise and fall in the popularity of artifacts. Indeed the behavioral archaeologists developed artifact performance characteristic models in order to render such problems as comparisons of technologies underlying these assemblages. If we can incorporate artifact animacy into such behavioral archaeology models, then we can begin to address the role ritual technologies play in the formation of artifacts assemblages. In this paper I review how animacy contributes to ceramic technologies among Native peoples of the American Southwest and then translate these data into behavioral models of artifact performance. I then apply these models to a case study of Jornada Mogollon phases in Southern New Mexico between AD 750 and 1450.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• Building Bridges: Papers in Honor of Teresita Majewski

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38750.0