Ceramic Manufacture: Indigenous and Colonial Wares in Mission Life

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

The Mexican supply routes to the Texas missions were often unreliable, and could not guarantee an inventory of daily necessities to the mission population. As a result, the Indigenous populations of the missions were required to become self-sufficient and provide their own key resources. This necessitated mission inhabitants to grow their own crops, process food, and manufacture ceramic storage, cooking, and food processing vessels. Because the population of the mission included members of several Indigenous pottery-making groups, the ceramic assemblages recovered from the missions consists of several ceramic manufacture traditions. The ceramic traditions identified in the mission assemblage showcase experimentation with both Indigenous and Mexican-style ceramic production techniques. This paper examines the interaction between potters and pottery manufacturing traditions within the mission assemblage.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Indigenous Practices and Material Culture: Seventy Years of Mission Life

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 51508