Historic Tewa pottery 1600-1800 and Social Survivance

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Pottery making over the long arch of Tewa history is episodic; social changes bringing small and large-scale modification and sometimes transformation to pottery forms and iconography. Pottery, or more precisely, its aesthetics and production are ritualistic, serving as a critical and material conceptual ideal of the Tewa world. And, significantly, pottery is a social tool, whether mediating Tewa people’s settlement on new lands during the 14th century, adaptation to Spanish colonization, or to the onset of the cash economy and 20th market for Pueblo art pottery. As Tewa people remind us, "Our history is recorded in pottery."

Most Tewa pottery studies use stylistic analysis or typological studies, one pottery type instinctively leading to the next. This suggests an absence of sentience by the potters and sui generi basis for understanding Tewa culture. And, in particular, when approaching pottery this way we are more apt to input outsider knowledge over that of Tewa people’s own sentience, a long habit of colonial powers and academic disciplines. Historic pottery is rarely studied and imperfectly understood, existing as archaeological sherds and whole pottery in museum collections. My discussion brings together disparate collections with fresh ethnographic inquiry

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40047.0