On the Origins of Pottery

Renewed research interest in the origins of pottery has illuminated an array of possible precipitating causes and environmental contexts in which pottery began to be made and used. This article is an attempt at synthesizing some of these data in hopes of stimulating further research into this intriguing topic. Following a review of theories on the origins of pottery, discussion proceeds to a survey of geographic and cultural contexts of low-fired or unfired pottery, highlighting the role(s) of pottery among contemporary hunter-gatherers and summarizing data pertaining to varied uses of pottery containers. It is argued that objects of unfired and low-fired clay were created as part of early prestige technologies of material representations beginning in the Upper Paleolithic and are part of an early software horizon. Clay began to be more widely manipulated by nonsedentary, complex hunter-gatherers in the very Late Pleistocene and early Holocene in areas of resource abundance, especially in tropical/subtropical coastal/riverine zones, as part of more general processes of resource and social intensification (such as competitive feasting or communal ritual). Knowledge of making and using pottery containers spread widely as prestige technology and as practical technology, the kind and timing of its adoption or reinvention varying from location to location depending on specific needs and circumstances.     

An Alternative Way Towards Food Production: The Perspective from the Libyan Sahara

Food production originated in various ways in different parts of the world. Plant domestication with the adoption of agriculture has been successful in some areas, but not in others, where animal domestication with nomadic pastoralism proved to be more effective. Likewise, the preceding phases of pre-adaptation and development of a broad spectrum of wild resource exploitation followed different pathways, according to the locally available resources, climatic and geographic conditions, and social organizations. Northern Africa greatly contributed to the understanding of the origin of food production under preconditions that differed from those in the Fertile Crescent. Apart from a narrow strip along the Nile valley, northern African lands are arid and scarcely productive for agriculture. Nevertheless, early studies interpreted northern African archaeological records of the Early and Middle Holocene according to the traditional north-western Mediterranean and Near Eastern frames of reference. Consequently, terms such as Epipalaeolithic, Mesolithic, and Neolithic were uncritically applied to northern African contexts. This paper compares and discusses the evidence for food production in the Near East and northern Africa, considering the question of introduction or local breeds of domesticated animals in the Maghreb and the Sahara. It then reviews the relevant data for long-held diffusionist models of pastoralism into Africa to provide a different perspective and the proper means of interpretation of the northern African archaeological records. Finally, it examines some recent findings from the Tadrart Acacus, in the Libyan Sahara, which contribute to clarification of distinctive African pathways and propose an alternative model for the beginnings of food production.     

Remembering Gotham: Urban Legends, Public History, and Representations of Poverty, Crime, and Race in New York City

The past is never truly past, nor are historians/archaeologists privileged stewards of a city's memory. The moment ground was broken at Five Points, researchers encountered a public avidly interested in the history of New York's legendary nineteenth-century slum. From the 1840s this Manhattan neighborhood provided journalists with grist for lurid tabloid tales, creating a grim literary legacy that lingers in popular historical memory into the twenty-first century and also continues to shape public perceptions of poverty and antipoverty policies. New York's press remains steeped in memories of a crime-infested Five Points. Even as researchers uncovered nineteenth-century accounts of gangs, prostitution, and sweat-shop labor at the Five Points, our own newspapers arrived with blaring headlines drawing on nineteenth-century stereotypes of poverty, race, and place. The struggle to create alternative accounts of life in Five Points based on archaeological evidence clashed with these tenacious narratives and the class interests informing them.     

Domesticated Landscapes: The Subsistence Ecology of Plant and Animal Domestication

Harvesting different species as foods or raw materials calls for differing skills depending on the species being harvested and the circumstances under which they are being taken. In some situations and for some species, the tactics used are mainly behavioral—that is, people adjust, or adapt, their own actions to fit the behavior and circumstances of the species they are taking. Under other circumstances and for other species, the skills and tactics used may call for greater environmental preparation or manipulation. Therefore, instead of trying to distinguish people today and in the past as either foragers or farmers, it makes sense to define human subsistence behavior as an interactive matrix of species and harvesting tactics, that is, as a provisions spreadsheet.     

Le droit a l'adhyayana selon la Mīmāmsā

Summary This paper is a short survey of five Mmms authors - in chronological order, abara, Kumrila, Prabhkara, likantha, Prthsrathi Mira - in reference to the right (adhikra) of learning by heart the Veda (adhyayana). More or less explicitly, they dismiss it for the social class of the dra, and their gloss on the first stra of the dra is highlighted with the help of this view. The paper summarizes also a number of points raised by this complicated stra.     

Resisting Traditions: Ceramics, Identity, and Consumer Choice in the Outer Hebrides from 1800 to the Present

On a number of levels, peripheral status has been imposed on the Outer Hebrides (Scotland) since the Jacobite Rebellion in 1745. Drawing on a series of interviews with Hebridean families, this paper explores the changing meanings of ceramics imported into the islands from the early nineteenth century and displayed on wooden dressers. It is argued that in renegotiating their identity in the face of a series of externally generated economic changes, rural communities in the Hebrides have acted as thoughtful consumers, appropriating mainland material culture to their own ends. Throughout this process, imports have behaved ambiguously. This ambiguity is crucial to our understanding of the relationship—here characterized not as resistance but as resistant adaptation—between the Hebrides and the mainland.     

The prehistory of Cyprus: Problems and prospects

The archaeological record of prehistoric Cyprus is rich, diverse, well-published, and frequently enigmatic. Regarded by many as a bridge between western Asia and the Aegean, Cyprus and its past are frequently seen from scholarly perspectives prevalent in one of those two cultural areas. Its material culture, however, differs radically from that of either area. Apart from the early colonization episodes on the island (perhaps three during the pre-Neolithic and Neolithic), evidence of foreign contact remains limited until the Bronze Age (post-2500 B. C.). This study seeks to present the prehistory of Cyprus from an indigenous perspective, and to examine a series of archaeological problems that foreground Cyprus within its eastern Mediterranean context. The study begins with an overview of time, place, and the nature of fieldwork on the island, continues with a presentation and discussion of several significant issues in Cypriot prehistory (e.g., insularity, colonization, subsistence, regionalism, interaction, social complexity, economic diversity), and concludes with a brief discussion of prospects for the archaeology of Cyprus up to and beyond 2000.     

Les Aśvin Dans Les Énumérations Divines Du Neuvième Mandala De La Rgvedasamhitā

Although they are soma-drinkerslike Indra or Vyu, the Avins, in the ninthmandala of the Rgvedasamhit do not appear morethan four times, probably because their culthas lost importance. Nevertheless, the fewstanzas mentioning them among other vedicdeities in order to compose a minimal pantheon do notcontain very interesting data except the fact that thosetwins seem to be somehow more closelyassociated with the ambiguous Vyu. Having analysedthe stanzas, I propose some new solutions tothe grammatical and semantical problems they present(9.7.7 rána,dhármabhih;9.7.8 vidnah;9.8.1 abhí priyám;9.81.4 suyám;9.88.3 istáym,vivávrah)     

Naturschutz—Aspekte der internationalen Zusammenarbeit

Der weltweite Verlust an biologischer Vielfalt hält unvermindert an. Es ist nicht damit zu rechnen, daß das im Jahr 2000 auf dem Millenniumsgipfel der UN verkündete Millenniumsentwicklungsziel Sicherung der ökologischen Nachhaltigkeit mit der Maßgabe, den Verlust von natürlichen Ressourcen umzukehren, innerhalb der nächsten Jahre erreicht wird. Auch der Umsetzungsplan des Johannesburg-Gipfels 2002, in dem es heißt, daß der Artenverlust bis zum Jahr 2010 signifikant vermindert werden soll, dürfte kaum erfüllbar sein. Daraus ergeben sich Fragen nach den Ursachen des Biodiversitätsverlusts, nach dem internationalen Verständnis von Naturschutz, aber auch nach der Wirksamkeit des Rio-Johannesburg-Prozesses (Konferenz der Vereinten Nationen für Umwelt und Entwicklung, Rio de Janeiro 1992; Weltgipfel über nachhaltige Entwicklung, Johannesburg 2002) mit seinen zahlreichen weiteren nationalen, überregionalen und internationalen Veranstaltungen und Initiativen sowie schließlich auch nach der Rolle der deutschen Entwicklungs- und Umweltpolitik.     

The Woodland and Mississippian traditions in the prehistory of Midwestern North America

Cultural developments in Midwestern North America between 5000 and 400 B.P. are reviewed and related to two overlapping, but contrasting, cultural traditions: Woodland and Mississippian. Significant changes in prehistoric subsistence systems, settlement patterns, and sociopolitical organization are reviewed within a three-division framework, beginning with a Transitional period (5000–2000 B.P.) when Late Archaic and Early Woodland societies settled into different regions, constructed regional markers (cemeteries, mounds, earthworks), and established economic and social relations with both neighboring and more distant groups. This was followed by the Middle Woodland period (2000–1500 B.P.) that is associated with the Hopewell climax of long-distance exchange of exotic materials, mound building, and ceremonial activities, although all Middle Woodland groups did not participate in this Hopewell interaction sphere. In the Late Prehistoric period (1500–400 B.P.), the Woodland tradition persisted in some areas, while the Mississippian tradition developed from local Late Woodland societies elsewhere. Finally, the patterns of interaction between the two traditions are discussed.     

Art,history, and gender: women and clay in West Africa

Women dominate the production of pottery in Africa, yet few scholars have considered women the likely creators of the figurative ceramic sculpture recovered archaeologically across the savanna. Indeed, the question of who made these highly celebrated ceramics is rarely raised. A close look at the art historical and archaeological literature exposes the gender biases that privilege men's high art over women's low craft, making men the presumed creators of these works. Examples of women's predominance in the production of ritually-destined figurative ceramics in Nigeria alone counters such unsubstantiated assumptions. Through such production women play important roles in the construction of social and cultural meanings. It does make a difference in our reading and writing of history to understand and reconstruct what women make as well as what men make.

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Résumé Les femmes dominent la production d'objets en argile en Afrique, mais peu d'experts ont considéré les femmes comme créatrices probables des sculptures figuratives en céramique découvertes dans des fouilles archéologiques dans toute la savane. De fait, la question de savoir qui fabriquait ces céramiques hautement prisées est rarement soulevée. Une étude plus approfondie de la littérature ayant trait à l'histoire de l'art et à l'archéologie met en évidence les partis pris sexuels qui privilégient l'art élevé des hommes par rapport à l'artisanat vulgaire des femmes, faisant des hommes les créateurs présumés de ces oeuvres. Des exemples de la prédominance des femmes dans la production de figurines rituelles en céramique au Nigéria contredisent ces suppositions non prouvées. Par cette production, les femmes jouent un rôle important dans l'élaboration de notions sociales et culturelles. Comprendre et reconstruire ce que font les femmes, de même que ce que font les hommes, nous fait lire et écrire l'histoire différemment.

     

Low-Fired Earthenwares in the African Diaspora: Problems and Prospects

Local earthenware associated with enslaved African populations in the Americas, variously called Colono-Ware, Afro-Caribbean Ware. Yabbas, and Criollo ware, has received considerable attention from researchers. What unifies this disparate group of ceramics is not method of manufacture, design and decoration, or even form and function but the association or potential association with African diaspora populations. The ceramics incorporate some skills and techniques possibly brought by African potters to the Americas, as well as skills reflecting European and Native American traditions, and local adaptations in form, function, and manufacture. Analogies linking African ceramic traditions to American industries have at times been employed uncritically and have relied on generalized characteristics to infer overly specific meanings. With particular reference to low-fired earthenwares from Jamaica, this paper examines the historical and cultural context of these ceramics and the methodological and theoretical problems faced in their interpretation.     

Recent Issues in the Archaeology of the Mimbres Region of the North American Southwest

Archaeological research in the Mimbres region (southwestern New Mexico) has focused on the post-A.D. 500 ceramic/agricultural occupations, especially the Mimbres Classic period (1000–1130). This work has advanced general anthropological issues regarding mobility, land use and human impact, and the concept of abandonment. Deeper understandings of some of these issues require more detailed demographic estimates, which in turn are dependent on methodological advances, particularly studies of site use life. Research on the production and distribution of Mimbres pottery—famous for its naturalistic black-on-white designs—is advancing rapidly. Although the designs have been well illustrated and much discussed, more systematic anthropological research on Mimbres design style is badly needed. Various aspects of Mimbres social and ideational realms (e.g., household and community organization, social hierarchy, the symbolism of the pottery designs) have received some attention but await new perspectives derived from current social theory.     

Change and Inertia on the Frontier: Archaeology at the Paraje de San Diego, Camino Real, in Southern New Mexico

Archaeological testing was conducted at the Paraje de San Diego, a late sixteenth- through nineteenth-century camp site on the Camino Real 30 mi north of Las Cruces. The site is well preserved, though the site structure is complex, reflecting repeated, short-term occupation. The archaeological record (especially the many, diverse ceramics to be recovered) reflects certain changing conditions in southern New Mexico and elsewhere over time. However, the record also indicates a pervasive resistance to development. This resistance, which might be a widespread frontier phenomenon, is called structural interia.     

The Hohokam of Southwest North America

The Hohokam reached an apex of sociopolitical development between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries in the Sonoran Desert of North America. Hallmarks of the Hohokam tradition included red-on-buff pottery, large-scale canal irrigation agriculture, and monumental buildings, including ball courts, platform mounds, towers, and Great Houses. The development and elaboration of Hohokam society from their ceramic-producing predecessors during more than two millennia (ca. 1000 B.C. to A.D. 1450, or later) is a remarkable example of an arid land adaptation in the New World. The enigmatic collapse of Hohokam society took place shortly before European colonialists entered the North American Southwest in the mid–sixteenth century. Various agents (e.g., floods, disease, warfare) of this event are poorly understood and require additional study. So, too, does the degree of historical continuity between contemporary indigenous peoples and precontact archaeological cultures (e.g., Hohokam) in what is now Arizona and northern Mexico.     

Views and Commentaries: Composed Versus Simple Pasts: About Archaeologists and Their Partners

Partnership is an equitable exchange of knowledge. In fact, the very nature and indisputability of imported and taught knowledge—the scientific one and here archaeological—question the nature of the traditional and ordinary knowledge of peoples concerned. These two kinds of knowledge differ in the nature of the facts recognized by each of them: scientific facts or tacit common knowledge facts built differently, and in the number and strength of the external allies they succeed in mobilizing. Even if they remain translatable one into the other at a certain cost, they are engaged in a race. The result seems lethal for traditional knowledge unless powerful nonscientific allies, opposed to this leveling standardization, get involved with researchers aware of the stake for the South but also for the North, committed for some centuries to a rationalization supported by science, its technics, and the socioeconomic powers able to fund them.Le partenariat est un échange équitable de savoirs. En réalité, la nature et l'indiscutabilité du savoir importé et inculqué—le savoir scientifique et ici archéologique—met en cause la nature du savoir ordinaire et traditionnel des peuples concernés. Ces deux formes de savoirs diffèrent par la nature des faits reconnus par chacun d'eux: faits scientifiques ou faits du savoir observationnel ordinaire, construits différemment, et par le nombre et la force des alliés extérieurs qu'ils réussissent à se donner. S'ils sont traduisibles l'un dans l'autre à un certaincoût, une course est néanmoins engagée entre eux. L'issue en semble fatale aux savoirs traditionnels à moins que des alliés puissants non-scientifiques, opposés à ce nivellement uniformisateur, s'engagent à leurs côtés avec l'appui des chercheurs conscients d'un enjeu qui concerne certes le Sud, mais aussi le Nord engagé depuis quelques siècles dans une rationalisation appuyée sur la science, ses techniques et les puissances socio-économiques capables de les financer.     

Common Recollections: Resisting Enclosure “by Agreement” in Seventeenth-Century England

Through the enclosure of upland common wastes, an upwardly mobile yeomanry and lesser gentry sought to shift the emphases of local economies toward agrarian capitalism and strove to establish tighter control over burgeoning rural industries. An examination of the township of Castleton in the Pennine uplands of Derbyshire, where the 1691 enclosure proceedings and survey still survive, demonstrates that the typical historical view of such (non-Parliamentary) enclosure agreements is highly problematic. Confronted with the loss of customary common rights, poorer Castleton tenants were compelled to enclose strips within the open arable fields in order to husband animals. By attempting to preserve routines of daily life, however, they also resisted enclosure—through the conservation of common rights and customary practices and through efforts to maintain continuity in agricultural and lead-extraction activities.     

Stirrings at the Periphery: History, Archaeology, and the Study of Dian

Early Chinese texts speak of the Han state conquering the kingdom of Dian in southwest China in 109 B.C. The limited historical record is complemented by archaeolgical discoveries pointing to the presence in Yunnan province of a complex Bronze Age society whose association with the historical Dian has been generally accepted. Historiographic and nonprocessual in nature, archaeology in Yunnan has yet to generate the data needed for a deeper understanding of Dian social structure and change. Whatever its shortcomings, however, Dian archaeology plays a consistent and important role within a system of thought which gives preeminence to the historical record.     

Rethinking “Resistant Accommodation”: Toward an Archaeology of African-American Lives in Southern New England, 1638–1800

Scholarship concerning the lives of enslaved African Americans in southern New England has shifted rapidly from outdated models of acculturation to conflict-driven models of domination and resistance. With the assumption of conflict as the outcome of all power relations, both economic production and historical contextuality have been overlooked, with slavery systems in New England simply equated with other regions of the Atlantic world, rather than compared and contrasted. This essay reconsiders contests over power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. Drawing on the work of Greene (1966), Piersen (1988), and others, I argue that the system of slavery in the region may represent an anomalous case in terms of the means of control or the means of resistance. By examining demographic patterns, economic production, and agricultural landscapes in Rhode Island's East Bay, I argue that there may be more to be learned from William D. Piersen's (1988, p. 143) concept of resistant accommodation as a middle ground between the two extremes of the theoretical spectrum. The essay concludes with suggestions for further research on the archaeology of African-American lives in the region.     

Americanist Stratigraphic Excavation and the Measurement of Culture Change

Many versions of the history of Americanist archaeology suggest there was a stratigraphic revolution during the second decade of the twentieth century—the implication being that prior to about 1915 most archaeologists did not excavate stratigraphically. However, articles and reports published during the late nineteenth century and first decade of the twentieth century indicate clearly that many Americanists in fact did excavate stratigraphically. What they did not do was attempt to measure the passage of time and hence culture change. The real revolution in Americanist archaeology comprised an analytical shift from studying synchronic variation to tracking changes in frequencies of artifact types or styles—a shift pioneered by A. V. Kidder, A. L. Kroeber, Nels C. Nelson, and Leslie Spier. The temporal implications of the analytical techniques they developed—frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy—were initially confirmed by stratigraphic excavation. Within a few decades, however, most archaeologists had begun using stratigraphic excavation as a creational strategy—that is, as a strategy aimed at recovering superposed sets of artifacts that were viewed as representing occupations and distinct cultures. The myth that there was a stratigraphic revolution was initiated in the writings of the innovators of frequency seriation and percentage stratigraphy.