Tag: Theory and Method

This is an early pre-review version of a article published in American Antiquity and available here 

  Time and Population from the Surface at San Marcos Pueblo (LA98), North Central New Mexico

Ann F. Ramenofsky

University of New Mexico

Christopher Pierce

Web Data Works

Unpublished manuscript

DRAFT: Do not cite without permission of the authors 

Understanding the effects of European contact on the organization, size, and mobility of Pueblo populations in the Southwest requires detailed knowledge of the occupational histories of the large, aggregated settlements that typify the late prehistoric and early historic record. Unfortunately, such understanding is generally lacking because the methods used to document occupational histories of settlements tend to either obscure fine-grained temporal distinctions or necessitate costly and politically objectionable large-scale excavations. To overcome these difficulties, we analyze the surface record at San Marcos Pueblo (LA98), a large, late site in the Galisteo Basin of New Mexico, in an attempt to reconstruct the occupational and population history of the settlement. Using detailed mapping, systematic surface collections, and multiple seriations of midden deposits, we document several alternating periods of occupation and abandonment of the pueblo with population size varying from one occupation to the next. This reconstruction challenges conventional wisdom regarding the occupational history of these late, large settlements as representing deep sedentism with population decline and abandonment occurring only after Spanish contact.

 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.

Download a PDF reprint of the published version of this paper.

Any archaeologist who has excavated has encountered traces of burrowing animals, usually in the form of filled burrows visible as differences in the color or consistency of the sediment. While working in California during the latter half of the 1970s, I became curious about how all that burrowing may have affected the archaeological record. No one I asked seemed to know much about the critters or the nature of their impacts on the sites we were investigating. Burrowing rodents are quite common in California, and pocket gophers or ground squirrels were actively burrowing in virtually every site at which I worked. At the same time, I was taking classes in geology at San Jose State University and beginning to explore the interfaces between geology and archaeology, an area that would shortly come to be called geoarchaeology. I was mostly working on using soil chemistry to identify the uses or functions of different areas in archaeological sites and deposits. However, I took a course on soil ecology and learned that there was quite a bit known about the habits of animals that live in the soil including burrowing mammals.

Measuring Community Interaction: Pueblo III Pottery Production and Distribution in the Central Mesa Verde Region

Christopher Pierce, Donna M. Glowacki and Margaret M. Thurs

The scale, intensity, and character of interaction among Pueblo people during the 13th century A.D. likely played an important role in the processes and events leading to the abandonment of the Northern San Juan region in the 1280s. Characteristics of pottery production and distribution in the Sand Canyon locality provide one means of investigating these interactions. Variation among Pueblo III settlements in the use of temper and available raw clay sources, and the distribution of pottery production tools demonstrate the existence of at least two production areas within the locality. The nature of the boundary between these production areas indicates a complex pattern of settlement and community interaction that challenges models based on settlement proximity. Further, an almost complete lack of extra-regional pottery at Pueblo III settlements suggests that the Northern San Juan region may have been economically isolated from other regions inhabited by Pueblo people.

An edited version of this paper was publiahsed as:

Pierce, C., D. M. Glowacki, and M. M. Thurs
2002 Measuring Community Interaction: Pueblo III Pottery Production and Distribution in the Central Mesa Verde Region. In Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Community in the Mesa Verde Region, edited by M.D. Varien and R. Wilshusen, pp. 185-202. The University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

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.

Science and Explanation in Archaeology: A Response to the Post-Processual Critique

Christopher Pierce

The goal of scientific explanation has proven to be a significant challenge in archaeology as well as other social sciences. During the rise of the "New Archaeology" in the 1960s, there was great optimism that archaeology could become a true science simply by adopting the methods of science, in particular the explicit formulation and testing of hypotheses (e.g., Watson et al. 1971). However, this optimism has waned considerably as archaeologists have come to recognize that scientific explanation requires far more than borrowing rituals and concepts from other well-established sciences. Currently, little agreement exists among archaeologists regarding the particular theories and methods that are most suitable for generating valid, accurate and useful scientific explanations, and numerous different approaches vie for acceptance (Cordell 1994; Trigger 1989).

Will the Real San Marcos Pueblo Please Stand Up: An Examination of Bias and Error in Site Maps

 Shawn L. Penman, Ann F. Ramenofsky, Christopher Pierce, David Vaughan, and Eden A. Welker

Poster presented at the 63^rd Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, March 25-29, 1998, Seattle, Wa.

Maps make up an essential element of information about the archaeological record. Although archaeologists construct a wide variety of maps at different spatial scales, site maps are most fundamental. Site maps depict the locations and arrangements of architecture, features, and artifacts at ancient settlements. We routinely use site maps to carry out important resource management and research activities such as delineating site boundaries, estimating past populations, and reconstructing the internal organization of settlements. These uses of site maps are so common, in fact, that we tend to forget that the maps are two-dimensional abstractions and interpretations of a complex three-dimensional surface, and treat them instead as objective, accurate, and reliable descriptions.

In this poster, we take advantage of the existence of three, independently produced maps of one site, San Marcos Pueblo (LA 98) located in Galisteo Basin of north central New Mexico. We use these maps, produced over a period of 82 years, to examine similarities and differences in the ways the maps depict this large, complex settlement. Further, we evaluate how different goals, methods, conditions, and perceptions affect the accuracy and precision of site maps.

Quantifying Pottery in Pueblo III Assemblages from Southwestern Colorado

Christopher Pierce

The need to quantify pottery from archaeological contexts stems from the desire to compare different pottery assemblages or collections. Since a primary goal of the Sand Canyon Archaeological Project and the Site Testing Program involves quantitative and qualitative comparisons of assemblages to ascertain temporal, functional, and social relations, the methods used to quantify pottery for comparison must be considered. The task of quantifying pottery is complicated by the fact that most pottery recovered from archaeological contexts consists of broken pieces, or sherds, rather than the complete vessels--the unit of manufacture and use. This discussion begins with an assessment of the characteristics of sherds and vessels as units of comparison of archaeological assemblages and finds sherds to be the most appropriate unit in most cases. The two measures of sherd abundance used in the Crow Canyon analysis, count and weight, are then examined, and weight is found to be the best measure for most cases because of the effects that pottery technology, use, deposition, and postdepositional history (including excavation and lab treatment) have on sherd counts.

A Critique of Middle-Range Theory in Archaeology

Christopher Pierce

For the past decade, several archaeologists have advocated the development of middle-range theory as a way to give objective meaning to the archaeological record (e.g., Bettinger 1987; Binford 1977, 1983b; Thomas 1983, 1989; Torrence 1986). They argue that we must translate the static archaeological record into behaviorally dynamic terms by documenting causal linkages between relevant behaviors and their static material by-products. This is accomplished, they argue, by making observations today that establish signature patterns allowing the unambiguous recognition of particular dynamics from their static by-products, and inferring past dynamics from identification of signature patterns in the archaeological record. Further, it has been emphasized that the operations and products of middle-range theory must remain logically independent of the general theory we use to explain the past to avoid automatically confirming our ideas about the past through a tautology. This approach to middle-range research is flawed in two major respects. First, the justification of inferences relies on the establishment of universal behavioral laws and unambiguous signature patterns to validate the use of uniformitarian assumptions, neither of which can be accomplished in the manner proposed. Second, the tautological relationship between description and explanation is not only an unavoidable, but also a necessary aspect of science. Solutions to these problems lie in using the physical characteristics of the archaeological record itself as our source of knowledge about the past rather than translating the record into untestable behavioral reconstructions.