Tag: Experimental Archaeology

 Reverse Engineering the Ceramic Cooking Pot: Cost and Performance Properties of Plain and Textured Vessels

Christopher Pierce 

Ceramic cooking pots throughout the world vary in exterior surface treatment from smooth to roughly textured. An intriguing example of this variation occurred in the Puebloan region of the southwestern United States where cooking pots changed from scraped plain to highly textured, corrugated vessels between the seventh and eleventh centuries AD, and then reverted back to plain-surfaced by the fifteenth century. To investigate potential cost and performance differences between plain and corrugated cooking pots, a set of controlled experiments were performed, which document manufacturing costs, cooking effectiveness, and vessel durability. These experiments indicate that while corrugation may have increased manufacturing costs, neck corrugations improved vessel handling, upper body corrugations yielded greater control over cooking, and basal corrugations extended vessel use-life. Discerning the explanatory significance of these results for cooking pot change in the Southwest and elsewhere requires additional data on the contexts in which these pots were made and used.

Published as:

Reverse engineering the ceramic cooking pot: Cost and performance properties of plain and textured vessels. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 117-157, June, 2005.

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