The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Dynamics in the Southwest, AD 1250-1680 - Hardcover

Judith A. Habicht-Mauche; Suzanne L. Eckert; Deborah L. Huntley

9780816524570: The Social Life of Pots: Glaze Wares and Cultural Dynamics in the Southwest, AD 1250-1680

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0816524572 ISBN 13: 9780816524570

Publisher: The University of Arizona Press, 2006

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About the Author:

Judith A. Habicht-Mauche is professor of anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and author of The Pottery from Arroyo Hondo Pueblo, New Mexico: Tribalization and Trade in the Northern Rio Grande. Suzanne L. Eckert is assistant professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University. Deborah L. Huntley is a project director for Southwest Archaeological Consultants in Santa Fe.

From the Inside Flap:

The demographic upheavals that altered the social landscape of the Southwest from the thirteenth through the seventeenth centuries forced peoples from diverse backgrounds to literally remake their worldsatransformations in community, identity, and power that are only beginning to be understood through innovations in decorated ceramics. In addition to aesthetic changes that included new color schemes, new painting techniques, alterations in design, and a greater emphasis on iconographic imagery, some of the wares reflect a new production efficiency resulting from more specialized household and community-based industries. Also, they were traded over longer distances and were used more often in public ceremonies than earlier ceramic types. Through the study of glaze-painted pottery, archaeologists are beginning to understand that pots had asocial livesa in this changing world and that careful reconstruction of the social lives of pots can help us understand the social lives of Puebloan peoples. In this book, fifteen contributors apply a wide range of technological and stylistic analysis techniques to pottery of the Rio Grande and Western Pueblo areas to show what it reveals about inter- and intra-community dynamics, work groups, migration, trade, and ideology in the precontact and early postcontact Puebloan world. Through material evidence, the contributors reveal that technological and aesthetic innovations were deliberately manipulated and disseminated to actively construct acommunities of practicea that cut across language and settlement groups. "The Social Life of Pots" offers a wealth of new data from this crucial period of prehistory and is an important baseline for future work inthis area.

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