Tag: Technological Change

The Development of Corrugated Pottery in Southwestern Colorado

Christopher Pierce 

Archaeological research has documented the broad outlines of the development of corrugated utility pottery from plain and neck-banded anteceedents. However, a reliance on typological descriptions has obscured the technological details of this development. An attribute analysis of six well-dated utility-ware assemblages from southwestern Colorado indicates that corrugation appeared first in this region during the eigth century A.D. as wide, non-overlapping coils left unsmoothed around jar necks. During the ninth and tenth centuries, the variety and frequency of neck-banding increased with the introduction of narrower coils, overlapping of adjacent coils, and incising and indenting of coil surfaces. By the early eleventh century, one recent neck-banding variant, narrow, substantially overlapped and indented coils, replaced almost all others, and was extended over the entire exterior surface of jars for the first time. Performance benefits of this full-body, indented corrugation may explain its rapid adoption in southwestern Colorado.

An edited version of this paper has been published as:

Pierce, C.
2005 The Development of Corrugated Pottery in Southwestern Colorado. Kiva 71: 79-100.

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 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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Toward a Unified Evolutionary Theory of Culture

Christopher Pierce

Although scholars have long appreciated the fact that human cultures and societies evolve, there is yet little agreement on what a theory of cultural evolution should look like. Among anthropologists and other social scientists, a wide range of opinion exists regarding the appropriate features of a viable evolutionary approach to explaining sociocultural variation and change (e.g., Barton and Clark 1997; Boone and Smith 1998; Dennett 1995, 1998; Dunnell 1980, 1989; Durham 1991; Flinn 1997; Hallpike 1988; Lyman and O'Brien 1998; Maschner 1996a; Rindos 1985; Rosenberg 1994; Spencer 1997; Sperber 1996; Trigger 1998). Several schools of evolutionary thought have developed within the social sciences including sociocultural evolutionism, cultural selectionism, cultural transmissionism, coevolutionism, processualism, evolutionary archaeology, human evolutionary ecology, sociobiology, evolutionary psychology, cultural virus theory, and memetics. Although some of the differences among these evolutionary approaches are substantial, many points of disagreement are very subtle and difficult to follow.

The History of Attempts to Explain Southwestern Corrugated Pottery

Christopher Pierce

Southwestern corrugated pottery consists mainly of utilitarian or culinary jars displaying distinctively textured exterior surfaces, but lacking slip and paint. The textured surface was produced by not obliterating or smoothing the thin coils or ropes of clay used to construct the vessels creating a horizontally ridged appearance, hence the name corrugated. From the late tenth through early thirteenth centuries AD,ancestors of the modern Pueblo people across most of the northern part of the American Southwest (Figure 1) adopted a variety of corrugated pottery referred to as all-over, or full-body indented corrugated. This form of corrugation has systematically pinched or indented coils left exposed over the entire exterior surface of the vessel. Precursors to full-body corrugation had unindented exposed coils restricted to the neck portions of the jars, and are referred to as neck-banded pottery. Earlier still, culinary vessels had entirely plain surfaces produced by scraping both interior and exterior surfaces until the coils or other construction elements were completely obliterated (Figure 2). The all-over indented corrugated technology continued until the fifteenth century when Pueblo potters returned to plain-surfaced cooking pots.

The Production and Use of Puebloan Utility Ware Pottery

Christopher Pierce

Understanding the production and use of ancient plain and corrugated pottery provides crucial information on how the pottery interacted with different aspects of its environment during the development and spread of corrugation technology. By production, I refer to the conditions under which the manufacture of utility wares took place. These conditions include how potters learned their craft, technologies involved in the manufacture of utility wares, and aspects of the organization of utility ware production. In documenting the use of utility wares, I am concerned with the kinds and intensity of uses in which the manufactured vessels were employed.

The Spread of Corrugation Technology in the American Southwest

Christopher Pierce

Documenting the spread of corrugation technology on the basis of published information is a formidable undertaking. Given that one must rely, for the most part, on pottery type data from diverse regions of the Southwest, two hurdles present themselves. The first has to do with dating. Ideally, one reconstructs the spread of corrugation based on independent, absolute dates of the earliest appearance of a particular corrugation type, or technique, in different areas of the Southwest. However, many areas of the Southwest lack adequately dated pottery assemblages that span the entire sequence of changes. Consequently, the beginning and ending dates for many pottery types are based on cross dating with other regions. While often useful for general chronological purposes, cross dating can introduce problems when one is trying to determine if a particular kind of pottery is slightly earlier or later in one region than another. The second hurdle involves the use of numerous different typological schemes across the Southwest. Pottery type names and descriptions can vary considerable from one region to another making it difficult, in some cases, to be sure that one is dealing with the same technology. Utility wares have not generally been accorded the kind of intense scrutiny often given to painted pottery in the Southwest. This lack of attention means that many dating and typological discrepancies and subtleties have gone unexamined or undocumented. As a result of these issues, the reconstruction of the spread of corrugation across the Southwest I present here should be considered tentative, and subject to alteration as new data come to light and more thorough evaluations of existing data are conducted.