Uncovering the Artisans of Ayiin Winik: Using Paleodermatoglyphs to Determine Demographic Characteristics of Ceramic Producers

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Craft production is essential in understanding the past through material culture; it is imbedded in the socioeconomic and political systems of past societies. Understanding the division of labor among crafters is therefore valuable in analyzing social systems and should not be taken for granted but further explored. However, certain craft industries, such as ceramic production, have a paucity of evidence of potter demographics. This difficulty is compounded when attempting to identify divisions of labor based on age, sex, and gender, as archaeological interpretations often depend on inferences from contemporary examples whose relevance to ancient societies remains uncertain. Current dermatoglyph research suggests that a combined analysis of ridge breadth and ridge density provides a reliable method for identifying both the age and sex of these individuals. This study analyses fingerprints, which reveal statistically distinct ridge breadth and ridge density measurements among children and adolescents, adult males, and adult females, to determine the demographics of ancient Maya potters at the site of Ayiin Winik in the Three Rivers Region of Northwestern Belize.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53633