The Influence of Tim Kohler's Early Pottery Analysis on Pottery Studies in Florida and the Greater Southeast

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Thinking of Acronyms: a Kohler Obsession? Papers in Honor of Timothy A. Kohler (TAKO)" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Even as a grad student, Tim Kohler was a renaissance individual in terms of expertise with the artifacts and materials of the southeastern US. At the Woodland Weeden Island-period McKeithen site in North Florida, his innovative statistical analyses and computerized mapping documented chronological and demographic patterning. Status areas were identified partly from pottery attribute analyses defining elite, trade, and utilitarian wares. Tim by no means abandoned consideration of pottery when he left for the Southwest, but this was maybe the last time he got his hands dirty with firsthand analyses of physical and technological characteristics. Tim greatly influenced my own work with McKeithen pottery. Traditional microscopy, refiring experiments, and comparisons to local clays allowed fine tuning of manufacturing origins and statuses. Non-local manufacture was mostly based on anecdotal consensus rather than known distribution of clays. Fast forward a few decades, and anecdotal consensus is replaced with data from specialized analyses of Weeden Island and related pottery and clays from dozens of sites. My petrographic work has been in collaboration with Neill Wallis and others incorporating NAA and LA-ICP-MS analyses. Our combination of methods has spurred comparable research in other regions and time periods in Florida and the greater Southeast.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Thinking of Acronyms: a Kohler Obsession? Papers in Honor of Timothy A. Kohler (TAKO)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50470