Language and Classification: Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics [1 ed.] 1138243361, 9781138243361

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Language and Classification

This volume adopts a practice-based approach to examine the different ways in which classification is communicated and negotiated in different environments within archaeology. The book looks specifically at the archaeological classification of ceramics as a lens through which to examine the discursive and social practices inherent in the classification and categorization process, with perspectives from such areas as corpus linguistics, discourse analysis, linguistic anthropology, and archaeology forming the foundation of the book’s theoretical framework. The volume then looks at the process of classification in practice in a variety of settings, including a university course on ceramics classification, an archaeological field school, an intensive petrography course, and an archaeometry laboratory at a nuclear research reactor, and highlights participant observation and audiovisual data taken from fieldwork practice completed in these environments. This volume offers a valuable contribution to the growing literature on language and material culture, making this a key resource for students and scholars in sociolinguistic, anthropological linguistics, archaeology, discourse analysis, and anthropology. Allison Burkette is Associate Professor of Linguistics at the University of Mississippi. Her publications include Language and Material Culture (2015) and Exploring Linguistic Science (2018).

Routledge Studies in Sociolinguistics

13 Social Media Discourse, (Dis)Identifications and Diversities Edited by Sirpa Leppänen, Elina Westinen and Samu Kytölä 14 Care Communication Making a home in a Japanese eldercare facility Peter Backhaus 15 Heritage Language Policies around the World Edited by Corinne Seals and Sheena Shah 16 The Politics of Translingualism Jerry Won Lee 17 Living Languages and New Approaches to Language Revitalisation Research Tonya N. Stebbins, Kris Eira and Vicki L. Couzens 18 Language Contact and the Future of English Ian MacKenzie 19 Discourse, Gender and Shifting Identities in Japan The Longitudinal Study of Kobe Women’s Ethnographic Interviews 1989–2019, Phase One Edited by Claire Maree and Kaori Okano 20 Language and Classification Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics Allison Burkette For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ Routledge-Studies-in-Sociolinguistics/book-series/RSSL

Language and Classification Meaning-Making in the Classification and Categorization of Ceramics

Allison Burkette

First published 2018 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2018 Taylor & Francis The right of Allison Burkette to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-1-138-24336-1 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-27733-2 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

List of Illustrations Preface Acknowledgments

vi viii x

1

Introduction: Negotiating Classification

1

2

Ceramics Classification

24

3

Teaching Classification: Classroom Typology

58

4

Classification in the Field: Historical Archaeology

79

5

Classification Down the Scope: Thin-Section Petrography

100

6

Classification via Reactor: Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis

116

7

Classification as Personal Interpretation

126

8

Conclusion

138

Bibliography Index

150 159

Illustrations

1.1 1.2 2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5

2.6 2.7

2.8 2.9

2.10

2.11 2.12 2.13

2.14 3.1

The scientific taxonomy (right) of the North American robin (left) Labov’s drawings of cup-like objects Examples of Dressel’s amphora types An example of Petrie’s (1901) sequence-dating typology A generalized seriation chart A discrete assemblage (left) and a continuous assemblage (right) Plot of body width (vertical) to mouth width (horizontal) for the Kokwa (dark circles), Chebloch (open circles), and Tot (triangles) An example of principle component analysis Variable measurements: 1 = total height, 2 = rim diameter, 3 = cross-section, 4 = neck diameter, 5 = height to neck, 6 = belly diameter, 7 = height to belly, 8 = base diameter, 9 = belly excurvature (a), 10 = height to (a), 11 = diameter at (a) Cluster analysis results: eleven categories based on eleven attributes Measurements of the principle components of vessel height and rim diameter results: twelve categories based on two attributes Measurements of vessel size (square root of cross-section) and shape (ratio of neck height to neck diameter) results: sixteen categories based on three attributes An example of Kempton’s drawings One informant’s indication of “olla” on Sheets 2 and 4 Percent of informants who chose each drawing as an example of “olla” (left) (1981, p. 72) and resulting contour map for Sheet 4 (right) (1981, p. 73) One informant’s “jarra” sheets on July 9 (right) and October 7 (left) My set of typology tools

11 16 25 27 28 31

32 33

34 34

35

35 43 45

46 47 64

Illustrations 3.2 3.3 4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4 5.1 5.2 5.3 6.1 6.2

7.1 8.1 8.2 8.3 8.4 8.5

Sample charts used as typing tools for archaeological ceramics My class notes on basic shape designations The dig site Suspected jackware sherd ‘Pinky-up’ ware Sherds for classification Thin-section slide preparation Light-polarizing microscope A view down the scope Instrumental neutron activation analysis Resulting bivariate plot in which ellipses represent 90% statistical confidence (Ferguson, pers. communication 10/18/17) MF’s waster dump The Cottonlandia sherds Side view of Cottonlandia 003 Cottonlandia thin-section slides (left) and a view of 001 down the scope (right) A large piece of grog in thin section 001, perhaps grog within grog Cottonlandia sherds’ PXRF results

vii 65 71 86 90 95 97 102 103 106 117

119 136 139 140 141 142 143

Preface

All three of my children have gone through a stage during which they have enjoyed sorting their toys into categories, placing like objects into groups that would then talk to, play with, or fight with one another (the groups, not the kids). Sometimes the criteria with which they sorted the toys were obvious, such as all the cats go here, all the bears go there, all the blocks go somewhere else entirely, or, more generally, all the hard toys are in one spot and all the soft, stuffed animals are placed in another. Every now and again, though, I would come across a sorting scenario for which I couldn’t figure out the means by which the toys had been grouped, even after running through a feature checklist (size, material composition, species, texture, color, etc.). And so already we know something about classification: It is ultimately a creative endeavor. Humans classify things all the time. Like narration, classification is a means of ordering an otherwise unordered experience, and language is the means by which we do this. Whether natural groups exist ‘out there’, and whether we can access what’s out there, are probably matters best left to philosophers. What I am interested in is the idea that categories and labels are the product of human interaction, with other humans and with the physical realities they are confronted with. Thus, the study of classification gives us insight into how people think, how we conceptualize the world that we encounter, and how we interact with that world and the things and people in it. The study of classification also gives us another look at the interaction(s) between language and material culture—between words and things. Rudolf Meringer and Hugo Schuchardt, progenitors of the Wörter und Sachen movement of the early twentieth century, believed that the study of words and the study of things should be combined, “as interwoven lines; the things, so to speak, forming the warp, and the words the woof” (Schuchardt, 1912, p. 832). Meringer cautioned that, to fully understand the bell, for instance, one must visit the bellfounder, and I myself have spent a great deal of time trying to weave together etymology and artifact, looking for congruencies between the study of language and the study of material culture. An interesting connection between these two pursuits has been the use of ‘language’ as a metaphor for material culture since (at least) the 1980s,

Preface

ix

when archaeologists and material culturalists framed discussion of objects and artifacts as ‘reading’ and/or ‘interpreting’ material texts. Though this idea has seen some pushback since then, the whole idea that language could be a metaphor for material culture assumes that these are separate, definable, delineable entities. Recent archaeological theory has questioned many boundaries, including those between subject and object, and between material and immaterial. The smudging of these boundaries prompts me to wonder why the boundary between language and material culture still seems so fixed. Linguists and archaeologists are both striving to better understand human behavior as it manifests through a cultural product. The reading I have done in archaeological theory has convinced me that archaeologists and linguists are asking a lot of the same questions and coming up with some of the same answers, yet we don’t spend a lot of time in dialogue with one another. To that end, I wanted the work that I did for this book to be the start of a conversation and in many ways, it has been. The discussions that I have had with archaeologists about this project have had an enormous impact on the way that I think about research, about data and artifacts, and about language. Though I have always had an interest in material culture and in the intersection of language and material culture, my academic background is in sociolinguistics and I have approached the material here from that perspective. I admit that I might be considered a bit of an odd sociolinguist in that a) I keep looking at words (as opposed to phonology or grammar), and b) I’m not a believer in linguistic structure—innate or otherwise—but I still consider myself to be one. I think about language as being the emergent product of individual interactions; we may perceive a structure, but language itself is always in process. I (now) think about classification in much the same way. In terms of the archaeologists and archaeological theory presented in this book, I have tried not to preference one over the other. I have done my best to look at the different approaches to classifying ceramic artifacts with objective curiosity; I’ve asked a lot of questions and considered a lot of answers. I am truly grateful for the scholars who were kind enough to share with me their time, expertise, and ideas. I’m sure I’ve accidentally gotten some things wrong, or missed the obvious from time to time, and I take full responsibility for that, but what I have learned over the course of this project has been transformative and I’ve enjoyed every minute of it. I hope to keep the conversation going.

Acknowledgments

It has been my privilege to learn about archaeology from many great teachers, among them Jeff Ferguson, Geoff (“the gods are so fickle!”) Hughes, Maureen Meyers, and Patrick Quinn. I have also been privileged to have a number of very fine students, many of whom contributed to this work through their interest, their help with transcription (Juliana Norton and Kate Moore), and their all-around good-natured tolerance of my archaeological tangents. I have a lot of people to thank, including my parents, Wayne and Nancy Burkette; my sister Amanda Grimstead and her family; as well as a host of friends and loved ones: Michael Adams, Lamont Antieau, Betsy Barry, Allen Clark, Felice Coles, John Harris, Mo Hartley, Amy Hirshman, Matt Kennedy, Bill Kretzschmar, Cary Sallis, Sheila Skemp, Susan Tamasi, Jacque Hettel Tidwell, Tamara Warhol, and Thomas Whitley. Much thanks is also due to the editors at Routledge, who have been supportive and encouraging throughout this process. Very tender and heartfelt thanks go to my children, Anne Paige, Kate, and Noah, my favorite people in the world, who asked more than once why I work so hard and accepted without question my reply: ’cause I love what I do and want y’all to be proud of me.

1

Introduction Negotiating Classification

Introduction In 1964, Eric Wolf described the discipline of anthropology as “the most scientific of the humanities, the most humanistic of the sciences” (p. 88). In an initial attempt to tease apart what practices can be deemed ‘scientific’ versus those that are ‘humanistic’, I turned to the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) for basic definitions. According to the OED, science is: a branch of study that deals with a connected body of demonstrated truths or with observed facts systematically classified and more or less comprehended by general laws, and incorporating trustworthy methods (now esp. those involving the scientific method and which incorporate falsifiable hypotheses) for the discovery of new truth in its own domain. Along these same lines, evolutionary biologist E.O. Wilson has defined science as “the organized, systematic enterprise that gathers knowledge about the world and condenses the knowledge into testable laws and principles” (1998, p. 58). Likewise, science fiction writer Isaac Asimov, during a 1988 appearance on the Bill Moyers Show, explained that “science does not purvey absolute truth; science is a mechanism. It’s a way of trying to improve your knowledge of nature; it’s a system for testing your thoughts against the universe and seeing whether they match.” As for the ‘other end’ of the spectrum, the OED defines the humanities as: the branch of learning concerned with human culture; the academic subjects collectively comprising this branch of learning, as history, literature, ancient and modern languages, law, philosophy, art, and music [. . .] The humanities are typically distinguished from the social sciences in having a significant historical element, in the use of interpretation of texts and artefacts rather than experimental and quantitative methods, and in having an idiographic rather than nomothetic character. Wilson also writes about the importance of the humanities, saying (among other things) that the humanities describe “the way a thought is translated

2

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into a symbol or artifact” (2014, pp. 56–57). Elsewhere, Wilson points out that the humanities (literature, specifically) and science both draw on the human capacity for narrative as a “way of working through a chaotic and unforgiving world”, emphasizing that, “science, like the rest of culture, is based on the manufacture of narrative” (2001, p. xv). And so, as much as Wolf’s statement makes intuitive sense in that anthropology is the scientific study of humanity, it also sets up a false dichotomy between the sciences and the humanities, because in the end, both are interpretive processes that attempt to answer questions about humanity, the world, and what it means to be human in the world. The present study stops to reflect at several points along this (largely hypothetical) continuum between the humanistic and the scientific in order to look at different methods of understanding and classifying ceramics and how those methods are taught. In his discussion of what sometimes appears to be “two cultures” within archaeology, the scientific and the ‘interpretive’, Jones (2002) explains that: On one side, we have a viewpoint which regards the archaeological record as the product of physical processes which can be examined empirically and objectively using the sense data that derived from the description of objects. These descriptions and measurements can then be built up into generalising laws that can be applied in all archaeological contexts. On the other side, we have a viewpoint which considers the archaeological record to be the product of meaningful social action. (p. 23) What this suggests is that the real difference between the ‘scientific’ and ‘humanistic’ approaches within archaeology is a matter of perspective, perhaps even a matter of ‘starting point’. The general point can also be made for the different approaches to studying language. It is difficult at times to draw the line between “linguistics”, “sociolinguistics”, and “linguistic anthropology” and no less difficult to consistently delineate “archaeology” from “anthropology”. Duranti (2009) notes that, “the different names used for referring to the study of language in/and/as culture (e.g. linguistic anthropology, anthropological linguistics, sociolinguistics) can be made sense of by a historical overview of the methods, goals, and academic affiliation of the researchers involved” (p. 31). At times, it has appeared to me (as a sociolinguist in archaeology-land) that the main difference between linguistics and archaeology as disciplines (or between sociolinguistics and linguistic anthropology) has less to do with their topics of interest and more to do with which journals we read and publish in. Many times, while reading books or articles on archaeological theory, I have noted how easy it would be to substitute the word ‘language’ for ‘artifact’ and have a perfectly reasonable contribution to a discussion on linguistic theory.

Introduction: Negotiating Classification

3

To talk about the classification of ceramics in archaeology, one must deal with a number of semantically similar terms, including group, category, class, and type. While there are no definitions that absolutely distinguish these one from the other, what follows is an attempt to illustrate the way these terms are used in this book. A group “exists in the phenomenological or empirical realm, specific to a time and a place” (Rice, 2015, p. 225). A group, then, is a real, physical thing; categories and classes are cognitive constructs, and when you classify something, you place it in a category. A series of potsherds excavated from the same strata of a filled-in posthole, for instance, is a group because of physical proximity. Whether those potsherds are deemed as falling into the same category (i.e. whether they are classified the same way) is largely up to the researcher. The potsherds might be determined to be of different types. A type is a “formal conceptual (or abstract) unit” grounded in the identification of attributes that form a pattern (Rice, 2015, p. 225). If all of the potsherds resemble one another and appear to have a similar clay composition, then they would likely be labeled as being of the same type. If half of them are plain and made of red clay and the other half are decorated and made of white clay, then they are probably going to be classified as two different types. For the imaginary sherds in this example, it would be easy to argue that the types (“plain red” and “decorated white”) are ‘real’ in the sense that the basic, physical properties of the sherds are consistent within each type and are consistently different between types. But what if all of the sherds, both red and white, were determined to be from 7-inch plates? Are they still different types? What if a couple of sherds are uncovered that are decorated and red; how are they to be classified? By clay color or by presence of decoration? (If you’re lucky, the ‘outlier’ sherds are from bowls.) It’s a simple example to be sure, but the point is that categories are constructions and reality seldom presents a neatly ordered array of objects to place in them.

A (Very) Brief History of Archaeology Archaeology began as the “study and collection of things” (Chilton, 1999, p. 1); specifically, archaeology studies things that are not natural in the sense that they have been altered in some way by human use. That alteration turns a thing into an artifact. Deciding that a found object is an artifact is the first step in the potentially lengthy processes of classification and categorization. What follows is a very brief history of archaeological theory, intended as background for non-archaeologist readers and aimed at providing a general context for the study of ceramics against the larger backdrop of archaeological artifacts. The classification systems used by archaeologists for ceramics are historically situated within the theoretical and methodological developments of the field. Early archaeology concentrated on collecting artifacts intended to be “specimens of museums” and considering those artifacts to be “object

4

Introduction: Negotiating Classification

lessons” through which one could learn about past cultures (Tylor, 1896, qtd. in Hicks, 2012, p. 34). The ‘butterfly collecting’ approach to archaeological artifacts transitions into the culture-historical approach of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Arnold, 1988, p. 4). The culturehistorical approach aimed to delineate cultures in terms of ethnicity or race, and to work out the chronology of their appearance in the fossil record. The culture-historical focus was prevalent in both North American and European archaeology, though an important difference between the implementations of this approach was that European archaeologists were investigating their own prehistory, while North American archaeologists were investigating the prehistory of an ‘other’ in the sense that they were European Americans studying past Native Americans (Trigger, 2006, p. 303). In terms of ceramics, the emphasis during this time was on labeling different pottery types (again, a kind of delineation) and then using those types to create chronologies. The publication of Lewis Binford’s (1962) paper, “Archaeology as Anthropology” marked the beginning of what is now labeled as processual archaeology, in which archaeologists were concerned not with “the Indian behind the artifact, but rather with the system behind both the Indian and the artifact” (Flannery, 1967, p. 120). Processual archaeology can be characterized by the following principles: • • • •

Archaeology should be considered science, not a branch of history, and should accordingly follow the scientific method The purpose of archaeology is to explain the past (not just describe it) The goal of archaeology is to make cross-cultural generalizations about common social processes The focus of study should shift from ‘human behavior’ to the “formation processes of the archaeological record” (Shanks & Hodder, 1995, p. 3–29)

The archaeological record provides data for deductive reasoning; therefore, a few artifacts can be taken to represent a culture. Processual studies took many forms, from ecological studies with a ‘systems’ focus (i.e. how humans interact with the environment and how that interaction plays out in material culture) to selectionism (the theory that human preferences are a survival strategy subject to natural selection) (Trigger, 2006, pp. 426–428). During the mid-twentieth century, American and Australian anthropologists and archaeologists were using ethnographic methods to study existing cultures, applying the “ethnographic analogy” to learn about the past by studying the present. Though some debate surrounded the application of this principle, the distinct subfield of ethnoarchaeology developed during the 1970s (Stiles, 1977, p. 90). Ethnographic methods had (more or less) been around since the early nineteenth century, but began to crystalize as more and more of these studies were conducted. London (2000) describes

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5

contemporary ethnoarchaeology as starting with a question, “a hypothesis to be tested in a systematic manner using techniques such as quantitative analysis, sampling strategies, and observations” (p. 2). The goal then, is to move beyond speculation “on the use of fragmentary artifacts or buildings” by looking instead at “the complete artifact in use and the person behind who uses it” (London, 2000, p. 7). The push to collect more ethnographic data occurred in conjunction with the waning of processualism, as researchers’ perspectives on ‘what is out there’ in terms of human culture broadened. The early 1980s saw some archaeologists break with processualism, moving the center of study from ‘cross-cultural commonalities’ to ‘diversity, variation, and idiosyncrasy’. Informed by Marx, Bourdieu, and by postmodernism, archaeologists such as Ian Hodder championed the idea that there is no “single objective version of human affairs” and that “multiple versions or truths [can be] seen from different standpoints” (Trigger, 2006, p. 447). The emphasis of postprocessualism is on variation and change and on the “creation and manipulation of social meanings, especially in the context of asserting, maintaining, or resisting social power” (Trigger, 2006, p. 462). Shanks and Hodder (1995) suggest that another term that could be used for postprocessual archaeology is ‘interpretive archaeology’, a term that foregrounds the researcher as an interpreter, stresses interpretation as a practice, and recognizes that different interpreters offer up a “pluralism of pasts” (p. 5). From this standpoint, archaeology is defined as “a material practice in the present, making things (knowledges, narratives, books, reports, etc.) from the material traces of the past” (1995, p. 5). Interpretation, therefore, will always be multivocal. Postprocessual archaeology stresses the importance of an ethnomethodological approach grounded in introspection and reflection. In fact, the postprocessual approach was applied in the United States in a way that emphasized investigator bias(es) and how bias might affect the interpretation of artifacts and of material culture. In postprocessual work, archaeologists are not “discovering” or “reconstructing” past human behavior; they are instead “constructing”, “inferring”, and “conjecturing” (Trigger, 2006, p. 508). The emphasis on the ‘interpretation’ of artifacts meshes with what is sometimes described as the ‘textual turn’ in material culture studies, wherein objects are considered to be situated within social practices with meanings that are contextual and then can be de- and re-contextualized over time. The meaning of an artifact unfolds through “translation and negotiation” (as opposed to being “uncovered” or “recovered”) (Olsen, [1987] 2013, p. 90). Though some would argue that determining the meaning of an object is impossible because “objects participate in a greater associated context of shifting meanings, rather than having any specific designative sense” (Buchli, 2000, p. 371), the underlying idea of the textual turn has remained: artifacts (and material culture) are texts that can be ‘read’ in order to better understand a ‘cultural book’.

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Thomas (1995, p. 344) notes that, “theory is nomadic” in that it tends to move from discipline to discipline, and the discursive turn of the 1990s is an example of such a movement as the theory of performativity moves from the study of language and gender (cf. Butler 1990) into other social sciences. The idea behind the discursive turn is that all aspects of social identity (i.e. gender, ethnicity, regionality) are discursive; in other words, a person’s social identity is continually constructed within interactions. Haviland (2005) explained that the self “emerge[s] from a life of interlocution, mov[ing] through time as self-conceptions are constructed, ordered, reordered, contested, revised, pulled apart and renewed during a person’s lifetime” (2005, p. 82). Discursivity surfaces in material culture studies within discussions of materiality—an idea that moves us beyond the “dualism of subjects and objects” (Miller, 2005, p. 3). One of the themes that arises from writings on discursivity and materiality is the idea that “there is no such thing as a ‘natural category’; all categories (i.e. material, immaterial, female, male, etc.) arise out of practice, the result of ongoing interaction and negotiation” (Burkette, 2015, p. 50). Conversations about the nature of categories (as ‘natural’ or as ‘constructed’) crop up throughout the eras of ceramics classification, and the present work applies a discursive turn to archaeological classification as an addition to that dialogue.

The Study of Ceramics The focus of the research presented here is the archaeological classification of ceramics, specifically the classification of pottery. The term ceramics refers to objects that are shaped from clay and then subjected to heat; the resulting product is “durable” and “retain[s] its shape when exposed to water” (Ellis, 2014, p. 209). Pottery refers to a subcategory of ceramics, specifically to containers used to store, prepare, or consume foods, liquids, or other goods (Ellis, 2014, p. 209). Pottery is not found solely in the kitchen, however; the issues surrounding containerization extend beyond the storage of foodstuffs to include the role of containers in transportation, burial, and other ceremonial situations. Often, pottery (or sherds, which are pieces of pottery) are examined as part of a larger assemblage, which refers to “an archaeologist’s grouping of artifacts [. . .] from a site by form and function, assumed to represent the material culture of a single occupation or cultural episode” (Rice, 2005, p. 472). Following are basic definitions of a few additional pottery-related terms that might be useful to the non-archaeologist: •

•

Clay—the raw material of pottery. Clay is fine-grained material that becomes plastic (i.e. malleable and sticky) when wet. Clay is the result of the decomposition of rocks through weathering or erosion. Temper—nonplastic materials intentionally added to clay by the potter to improve its texture or affect the pottery fabric’s overall response to

Introduction: Negotiating Classification

• •

•

• •

7

firing. Temper can be rock, sand, bone, shell, grog (crushed pottery), or organic material. Inclusions—nonplastic materials already present in the clay. Inclusions can be rock, sand, bone, shell, or organic material. Voids—holes, pores, or cracks in the pottery fabric. Holes are created when inclusions (or temper materials) burn away or fall out during firing. Pores and cracks form as the clay fabric shrinks as it dries or during firing. Decoration—alterations made to the pot surface; can include pinching, incising, applique, cord-marking, painting, burnishing, etc. Decorating may also involve the application of a slip or glaze. Slip—watered-down clay (often with color added) brushed over the surface of a pot before firing. Glaze—a mixture of powdered glass or other quartz-containing material and water that is brushed onto the surface of an already-fired pot before a second firing that then melts the quartz to create a hard finish. Glazing can also be accomplished by throwing salt on pottery while it’s being fired.

Note though that terms such as clay can have many different definitions: mineralogical (clay is composed of clay minerals, the most common of which are kaolinite, halloysite, montmorillonite, and illite [Banning, 2000, p. 165]); granulometric (clay granules are smaller than .002 mm); chemical (clay is composed of hydrous aluminum phyllosillicates, Al3O3 2SiO2 2H2O); or general academic (“a fine-grained earthy material that becomes plastic and malleable when wet and hardens with the application of heat” [Rice, 2005, p. 474]). Not one of these likely reflects how a potter might define clay (e.g. to a potter, clay is the stuff used to make pots). Judgments about the properties of clay and temper can be made using a handheld magnifying glass and simple tools though recent advances in archaeochemistry have widened the scope of what can be ascertained about the components of pottery. The archaeological and anthropological study of pottery has a long history for a couple of reasons, the first of which is the sheer volume of available samples for study. Not only was the production of pottery pieces widespread throughout human prehistory, but also ceramic artifacts (especially pot sherds) remain available for study because they are less likely to be scooped up by treasure hunters; pottery is viewed as less ‘steal-able’ than gold artifacts and less collectible than artifacts such as arrowheads (Rice, 1987, p. 25). In addition, because of its method of manufacture, pottery is both “formed and informed: pottery making is an additive process in which the successive steps are recorded in the final product” (p. 25); the human behaviors that created the artifact are in fact baked in to the clay. Finally, pottery can be viewed as a kind of lynchpin for other human behaviors. For example, pottery as a technology was thought for a long time to have arisen

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independently in a number of cultural centers as part of the Neolithic technocomplex, which included tools for food preparation, storage containers, and vessels for cooking, all of which were believed to have coincided with human populations gradually becoming less nomadic and more reliant on agriculture (Rice, 1987, p. 9). Recently, however, remnants of 20,000-yearold pottery vessels that appear to have been used for cooking and storage were found in a cave in the Jiangxi Provence of China, perhaps made and used by “mobile foragers who hunted and gathered during the Late Glacial Maximum” (Wu et al., 2012, p. 1696–1700). This find has implications for theories of the origins and spread of pottery technology and raises new questions about the relationship between pottery-making and the emergence of agriculture and the possible spread of pottery technology from East Asia to other regions (Shelach, 2012, p. 1645). Why focus on the classification of pottery? Because there are a number of approaches to the classification of ceramics generally, including the very humanities-oriented practice of ethnoarchaeology, the traditional practices of pottery typology and seriation, as well as current practices grounded in the physical sciences (e.g. petrography and archaeometry). Ethnoarchaeogical research on ceramics aims to reconstruct the practices and traditions of ancient cultures, using hands-on methods to re-create how pottery was made and what it might have been used for (cf. Stiles, 1977; London, 2000). Ethnoarchaeology is interested in whether pots were used for ritual, religious, or utilitarian purposes; the specific function(s) of particular pots (e.g. cooking versus storage); and how form and function are related, and these issues are investigated first-hand, by learning from potters and by trying out various potting techniques. Ceramics typology (cf. Shepard, 1995 [1956]) looks at characteristics of pottery, such as shape, size, temper, and decoration, all of which are observable to the naked eye (or at least with a 10× magnification hand lens). Seriation, an approach that looks at changes in form in order to date pottery, was introduced to the study of pottery by James Ford (1936). Seriation approaches the classification of ceramics as a chronological ordering of pottery and pottery ‘complexes’ (groups of pottery types from the same region and/or time period) graphically representing the presence or absence (and overlap) of different pottery styles. The study of ceramic typology also includes research on cognitive categories, which focuses on emic (insider) versus etic (outsider) descriptions (cf. Kempton, 1981). Both petrography and archaeometry fall toward the ‘science’ end of the investigative spectrum. Described as a “lost art” in both geology and archaeology, petrographical analysis consists of the examination of very thin slices of pottery samples under a light polarizing microscope in order to identify the types of rocks and minerals present in the clay. Petrography does offer quantitative results, but its process still relies on human judgment in terms of the identification of the rock and mineral components, not to mention the interpretation of those identifications within the context of archaeological

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sites. Recently, archaeochemical methods, such as neutron activation analysis (NAA), have been applied to archaeological finds. NAA identifies elemental components of a pottery sample based on the rate of isotropic decay. Although the results of NAA are comprehensive, this type of analysis does require access to a nuclear reactor and the results can often take months to accumulate. No matter the approach, recent decades have seen a shift in the dialogue about pottery, from conversations about product to conversations about process. For example, NAA has been used to document the presence of nonlocal pottery at a Native American site in Florida; this finding, when combined with other archaeological evidence, suggests that groups from Florida and Georgia participated in sustained trade and social contact that led, not to a uniform way of ‘doing’ pottery, but instead to a situation where varied potting techniques were used at the same time and place (Ashley, Neill, & Glascock, 2015). NAA was used in this case to fill in part of a larger picture that included not just the elements present in the pottery but also how the pottery came to include them. Much like the Florida study, this proposed work focuses on the process, not the product, and my interest in observing and discussing the process of classification is in itself a reflection of the direction archaeological study is moving. As such, the main argument of this work is that categories are emergent; they are the product of interaction(s) among speakers, objects, and environments. This type of interaction may be most obvious in classroom situations, where there is overt instruction within the back-and-forth of teacher/ pupil interactions (which are often focused on specific objects). Even in an archaeometry laboratory, where the output of NAA is a list of the elements that make up a fragment of pottery, there is negotiation of classification, since the process of archaeometry does not end with a list of elements. That elemental list has to then be applied back to the fragment, and NAA alone cannot indicate what elements were found within what parts of a pot, that is, if element X was found in the clay, temper, glaze, or even the remains of ancient contents, etc. Classification within NAA has to do with how the indisputable scientific data are reconstituted into information that is useful for archaeologists. Classification is a complex and emergent phenomenon, and my analyses of the interactions that surround the classification of specific ceramic artifacts suggest that it is a socially situated practice and that resulting categories are therefore socially constituted.

Scientific Versus Folk Classification Carl Linnaeus, considered to be the father of modern taxonomy, published a series of works in the mid-1700s that outlined a classification system for animals, vegetables, and minerals consisting of seven divisions (or taxons): 1) Kingdom, 2) Phylum, 3) Class, 4) Order, 5) Family, 6) Genus, and 7) Species. Linnaeus’ taxonomy was not intended to be representative of a natural

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order, but was instead devised as a means of the identification of plants, animals, etc. For example, flowers are initially divided into groups according to number of stamen they have (e.g. decandria have ten stamens; dodecandria have twelve stamens, etc.). It is important to note, however, that just because flowers with ten stamens are grouped together does not mean that all of the decandria are genetically related; it is on this point that the Linnaean taxonomy differs from a contemporary phylogenic taxonomy, which focuses on genetic relatedness vis-a-vis evolutionary change. The scientific taxonomy of a bird, for example the North American robin, doesn’t relay a lot of information to the layperson about what a “robin” actually is (Figure 1.1). A robin is a Turdus T. migratorius, which tells us little about the bird’s appearance or behaviors, other than that it is migratory. Ungerer and Schmid (2006) note that scientific taxonomies are often too complicated, too cumbersome, and too obtuse for everyday use; laypeople don’t need technically explicit models to go about their daily lives, they need “functionally effective” ones (p. 151). For a naming system to be functional and efficient, that system must take into consideration the fact that human beings are in “constant contact and involvement with the organisms and objects of the world around us” (2006, p. 65). Folk classifications, on the other hand, directly reflect the interaction between a group of speakers and their physical surroundings. Folk classifications are imbued with a specificity related to the fact that these are categories and labels that have emerged over time from daily use in a specific location. These types of classification are fluid in that, while they often embody knowledge that is culturally based and ‘traditional’, they also often exhibit the “fragmentation” or “incomplete transmission” of that knowledge across generations (Zamudio & Hilgert, 2015, p. 16). Unlike scientific classification systems, folk classification systems demonstrate variation in terms of how they are employed by speakers. Zamudio and Hilgert (2015), for example, in their examination of the names for stingless bees among speakers from the Misiones province of Argentina, observed similarities in the ways that speakers grouped the bees into categories. In addition, speakers also made similar judgments about how well specific bees fit into their categories. This general agreement between speakers was accompanied, however, by what Zamudio and Hilgert called “local naming variability” in the form of unnamed bees or bees that were “alternatively named” (2015, p. 16). This kind of situation, one in which there appears to be agreement within a group or culture on most things but not every thing has been found time and again in academic investigations of classification.

Classification and Language Famed sociolinguist William Labov commented on the object of linguistic study stating that, “If linguistics can be said to be any one thing, it is the study of categories” (1973, p. 342). Human beings can aptly be described

Figure 1.1 The scientific taxonomy (right) of the North American robin (left)

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as classifying animals, and, indeed, all of the so-called Western assumptions about categories and category membership are grounded in the belief that things in the world can and should be categorized because categories exist; not only are categories actually “out there” and perceivable, they are also definable, discrete, and democratic. These are the assumptions that underlie the classical view of categorization, as described by Aristotle in his Metaphysics, writing that things have both an essence (attributes which make something that thing) and accidents (individual qualities of a specific example of that thing). Categories, as Aristotle describes them, are definable in that each category member has the properties or characteristics that are necessary and essential for defining it as a member. Take, for example, the category of CHAIR, whose members have the essential condition of being a movable seat for one person having four legs and a back. We can come up with a list of features that ‘define’ the category as a whole and can thus use that list of features as requirements for category inclusion (and exclusion). Conveniently, these features are often binary (a thing either has the feature or it does not). Features of categories are often therefore presented in a +/– way; for example, category CHAIR could be described as [+four legs], [+level seat], [+back], [–tall]. Categories are discrete. A thing is either a CHAIR or it is not. There’s no ad hoc chair, there’s no “sort of” chair; discrete categories have clear-cut boundaries that make it possible (if not downright easy) to draw a line between members of category CHAIR and, let’s say, category TABLE. In addition, categories are democratic in the sense that every member is an equal member; no category member is a better example of that category than another, no CHAIR member is more chair-like than its neighbor. Categories can vary, however, in terms of what size membership they have. Some categories have a great many members (there are a lot of different kinds of tables and chairs); some categories have very few (there aren’t as many different types of toasters as there are houses). The reason that any of this is important is not rooted in some sort of human need for accurate chair, table, or toaster identification; the study of categorization is important because, for more than half a century, linguists and non-linguists alike have believed (to some degree or another) that the language one speaks influences the way one sees, comprehends, and deals with the world, partly because language is a tool for categorization. At this point, the topic of classification becomes a topic of philosophical (and linguistic) consideration. What are we doing when we name things, when we place item X into category Y, or say something such as, “that’s not a Y; it doesn’t have a Z”? Anthropologist Benjamin Whorf described the role of language in the process of classification, stating that language provides the names and labels that we impose on the world as a way of managing raw sensory input. Whorf’s frequently cited explanation of this process is as follows:

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We cut up and organize the spread and flow of events as we do largely because, through our mother tongue, we are parties to an agreement to do so, not because nature itself is segmented in exactly that way for all to see. Languages differ not only in how they build their sentences, but in how they break down nature to secure the elements to put into those sentences. (1998 [1942], p. 240) Language provides a means of arranging the world by giving speakers sets of categories into which our experiences and perceptions can be placed. For Whorf, these categories provide a basis for the worldview and culture of speakers who share the same (or similar) categories. Because of the relationship of language to classification, ideas about how we place things into categories and group them together became a conversation worth having, a conversation re-casted by Ludwig Wittgenstein’s family resemblance model. Wittgenstein’s (1953) Philosophical Investigations uses the example of GAMES to explain his theory of semantic categorization: Consider, for example, the activities that we call “games”. I mean boardgames, card-games, ball-games, athletic games, and so on. What is common to them all?—Don’t say: “They must have something in common, or they would not be called ‘games’ ”—but look and see whether there is anything in common to all.—For if you look at them, you won’t see a something that is common to all, but similarities, affinities, and a whole series of them at that. ([1953] 2001, p. 36) What we don’t see in the category GAMES is a set of common traits—or even one common trait; we find only “similarities” and “affinities”. Wittgenstein concluded that there is “no better expression to characterize these similarities than ‘family resemblances’; for the various resemblances between members of a family—build, features, colour of eyes, gait, temperament, and so on and so forth—overlap and criss-cross in the same way” (2001, p. 36). Family members only rarely look (or behave) exactly alike, and yet one can often inspect children and their close relatives and find physical attributes, gestures, or aptitudes that resemble that of one or more of their biological relatives. Eleanor Rosch, working in the field of psychology, conducted a series of experiments that provide support for the continuation of the basic ideas of Wittgenstein’s theory of categorization. The first set of experiments (cf. Rosch, 1973; Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Rosch, 1975) looked at how well category members represent the category they are in. That there could be better or worse examples from categories such as BIRD, WEAPON, or FURNITURE suggests that all category members are not created equal and that there are better birds (such as robins and sparrows, which were consistently

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ranked among the most birdy of birds) and worse birds (penguins and chickens are just bad birds). The experiment described in Rosch (1975) reports that, when participants were asked to rank how good of an X that Y was, across categories, “agreement between subjects was particularly high for the items rated as very good examples of the category; for example, for 9 of the 10 categories, 95% of the subjects agreed in giving the item with the mean best example rating the same score, that of 1” (1975, p. 198). For the category FURNITURE, the highest level of goodness was assigned to chair, dresser, table, and bed. A medium level of goodness was assigned to lamp, desk, stool, and television. Finally, a low level of goodness of example was assigned to rug, stove, fan, and counter. Note that this does not represent absolute agreement; category member goodness ratings are not the same for all participants: If 95% of participants agreed, then 5% had a different idea. Instead of clear lines and absolute agreement, we find general agreement about which category members are better examples of their category, much like the case of the stingless bees mentioned previously. Once inside the category, one must acknowledge that, “most, if not all, categories do not have clear-cut boundaries” (Rosch, 1975, p. 35). Basic object categories may have “clusters of perceived attributes” but the clusters are not necessarily uninterrupted. Rosch proposes that the structure of a category is not limited by its boundaries, but is instead anchored by prototypes. A prototype is a category member that “most reflects the redundancy structure of the category as a whole” (1975, p. 37). Prototypes are your most typical category member. Within the category CHAIR, we can have “bad chairs” and “good chairs,” but there will always be a few that are considered the “best chairs” and it is these that are prototypical. A ‘prototype effect’ can be observed experimentally—prototypical category members are often the examples written down first and written down the most frequently. In verification studies, prototypical category members are identified as being in their category more quickly than less typical members. Further experiments demonstrated that category attributes also demonstrate a high level of agreement when participants were asked to name, for instance, characteristics of BIRD. For each category, there were a handful of features that the majority of participants listed. For the category BIRD, specifically, the most commonly given features were attributes such as [+wings], [+flies], [+lives in nest]. These features, in turn, typify the category prototypes. In other words, prototypical category members will display (most of) the common attributes associated with the category. For speakers who share a language, there seems to be common cognitive ground in terms of category structure, in terms of which category members are considered ‘good’ (or ‘not so good’) examples and in terms of what kind of attributes are associated with the category in general. What we do, then, in everyday language is actualize categories—we make them real by calling a robin a “bird” (or an overturned crate a “chair”), thus reinforcing (or expanding) the attributes associated with a given category.

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Around the same time that Rosch and her colleagues were conducting the first of their experiments, Labov (1973) was investigating word boundaries, looking at the terms “cup”, “mug”, and “vase” and trying to tease apart the way that form and context interact to influence speakers’ choice of label. Labov’s discussion acknowledges that “words are slippery customers and many scholars have been distressed by their tendency to shift their meaning and slide out from any simple definition” (1973, p. 340). Labov proposes that this slipperiness is rooted both in the fact that words will change designations over time and in the fact that the things to which words refer also change; “it is not only that words are shifters; the objects to which they must be applied shift with even greater rapidity” (1973, p. 340). Labov’s study asked participants to evaluate drawings of cup-like objects (Figure 1.2), which varied by degree of width and height and also in terms of features such as handles or stems. Subjects were shown each drawing individually and asked to name each vessel. They were then asked to look at the drawings a second time, but this time the participants were asked to picture the object in one of three specific scenarios: containing coffee, mashed potatoes, or flowers. Labov found a relationship between vessel label and content context; for example, even for shapes that appear most cup-like, the use of “cup” as a label was keyed to context. The choice of “cup” as a label was increased in the coffee scenario, but “depressed by Food, and even further depressed by the Flower context” (1973, p. 346). Labov’s participants were content to apply the label “cup” to a wide range of vessel shapes and sizes when the vessel was presented in conjunction with the coffee scenario. The participants were less likely, however, to call a vessel a “cup” when the presented context involved food or flowers. Labov concluded that categories such as ‘cup’ and ‘mug’ include an “invariant core” (1973, p. 356) and in some ways this is similar to Rosch’s prototype theory and its assertion that prototypical members serve as cognitive anchors for their categories. Though Labov does suggest that the boundaries between categories can be located empirically, that one can find, as he writes, the “limits of categories and the limitations of the categorizing process” (1973, p. 356), what his study contributes to our understanding of classification is the idea that context can cause prototypes to shift. What might be considered prototypical against one background may not be prototypical when placed in a different context. Ungerer and Schmid (2006) propose that categories constitute cognitive models and that the category member considered prototypical at a given point in time is largely determined by context. As an example of the contextdependent nature of prototypes, Ungerer and Schmid present a series of statements about dogs, each of which calls to mind a different type or breed of dog: 1. The hunter took his gun, left the lodge, and called his dog. 2. Right from the start of the race the dogs began chasing the rabbit.

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Figure 1.2 Labov’s drawings of cup-like objects (1973, p. 343) Labov (1973)

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3. She took her dog to the salon to have its curls set. 4. The policemen lined up with the dogs to face the rioters. (2006, pp. 45–46) Although a retriever, greyhound, poodle, or German shepherd might not be prototypical dogs, they are the types of dog associated with the scenarios presented in the foregoing list. Ungerer and Schmid conclude that the structure of categories allows for members to shift around based on specific contexts. In addition, the particular features or attributes associated with a category can also be backgrounded or foregrounded, again depending on context. The attributes of [+barks] and [+wags tail], for example, are not highlighted as features of DOG in the aforementioned examples, though these may be frequently elicited features of the category DOG when gathered from study participants in the manner described previously. Considering categories as cognitive models (also referred to as ‘frames’ or ‘schemas’) allows for a kind of context-based fluidity that can be used to account for cultural differences as well. Ungerer and Schmid use the example of the category BUS, which for American speakers is often associated with the features [+yellow], [+school], [+children], but for British speakers would call to mind [+red], [+public transport], [+work] (2006, p. 55). Neither category membership nor the relative weight of attributes associated with category members is static; categories can be better described as a gestalt in which the category, its members, and their attributes are considered not singly (at least not initially), but as a dynamic whole. Approaches to cognitive linguistics that look at categories with this kind of gestalt perspective include Barsalou’s (1983) ad hoc approach, Croft and Cruse’s (2004) construal approach, along with Ungerer and Schmid’s (2006) cognitive model approach. Barsalou (1983) discusses ad hoc categories, which are categories such as ‘things to take from your house if it catches on fire’ or ‘how to make friends after you move to a new town’, that differ in character from the more common categories investigated by Rosch and colleagues in that ad hoc categories are conceived of in order to reach a specific goal (p. 211). Barsalou concludes, however, that ad hoc categories have the same kind of graded structure (one with ‘good’ and ‘better’ category members) as do common categories such as FURNITURE or FRUIT. Barsalou’s work thus expanded the idea of what a category is to include categories that are spontaneous and that are definitely not defined as the sum of their member-parts, but are instead part of a larger, interactional whole that is contextually coherent. After Barsalou, even the discussion of common category types had to take into account the idea that categories are not static and closed-off. Both the cognitive model and construal approaches treat categories more holistically. Take the category BIRD as an example. The attribute-based prototype theory produces a list of BIRD features such as the following: feathers, wings, beak, legs, feet, eyes, tail, head, claws, lays eggs, nests, flies, chirps, eats worms, and flies (Rosch et al., 1976, pp. 435–436). What do

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these attributes look like when they are combined into a meaningful whole? A cognitive model of BIRD is presented by Ungerer and Schmid: [. . .] parts like the beak, the legs, and especially the wings, have the appropriate form: the legs should have claws which allow the bird to cling to branches, the beak should be protruding and sharp to facilitate food picking, wings should be shaped aerodynamically. Even more important, the parts would have to have the right proportions (large wings in comparison to the remaining part of the body etc.) [. . .] these functionally balanced parts are all integrated into one gestalt, and are perceived as a whole. (2006, p. 38) Note that this cognitive model is not simply a story that employs the terms found in the BIRD attribute list; the attributes in action form a picture of the behavior of birds and how specific bird parts undertake those behaviors. The dynamic construal approach recognizes both “hard and soft aspects of word meaning” (Croft & Cruse, 2004, p. 104); there are logical constraints and entailments that serve as limiting factors to categories as well as contextual factors that can lead to variability and flexibility in terms of category membership and category boundaries. Part of the dynamicity of this approach has to do with the fact that not only will different speakers make “different judgments as to the location of boundaries”, but also “the same subject will make different judgments under different contextual circumstances” (2004, p. 95). Linguistic elements such as words and sentences don’t have meaning and categories don’t have boundaries; meanings and categories are the result of the continual process of encountering language, material objects, and mental/psychological states in specific circumstances. Meaning and categorization are therefore the result of “contextualized interpretation” (2004, p. 99). Contextualization comes into play in discussions of how human beings make categories within anthropology and archaeology as well. Archaeologist Daniel Miller (1985) begins his work, Artefact as Categories, with a breakdown of the theoretical consideration of classification of Emmanuel Kant, whose depiction of human cognition includes an innate structure (which Kant describes as being a kind of “grid”) through which we view the world. This grid is the lens through which we experience reality, which would otherwise be unknowable. Given this mediation between perception and reality, differences between cultures can be ‘explained’ by differences between ‘cultural grids.’ Miller contends that, because Kant’s theory did not account for “the context in which categorisation operated”, much of the thinking that followed in anthropology and in linguistics also downplayed the role of context in category-making,1 including the work of structuralism’s founders: Claude Levi-Strauss and Ferdinand de Saussure (Miller, 1985, p. 6). Concepts such as componential analysis (an Aristotle-like view

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of word meaning based on binary semantic properties) and Chomsky’s generative grammar (with its ideal speaker/hearer), which ran alongside structuralist thought throughout the second half of the twentieth century, smooth over “the nature of category variability found in the real world” and can be critiqued for “becoming an overused mould into which things are fitted, rather than adapting to meet the challenge of variability” (Miller, 1985, p. 7). In terms of how to address variability, Miller suggests using an idea from pragmatics, that of frames (cf. Goffman, 1974; Levinson, 1983). Frames are cultural ideas that become associated over time with specific linguistic or behavioral cues. By virtue of this association, particular ways of speaking, behaving, or using objects let participants know what kind of cultural event is taking place. For example, upon arriving a few moments early to class, a professor might engage in a few minutes of chit-chat with her students, but when the campus bell tolls, the opening of a book and a simple “OK, let’s get started” can initiate a change in frame, from friendly chatting to serious academic endeavor. Miller’s application of the concept of framing to pottery is discussed further in the next chapter. For now, suffice it to say that Miller suggests that not only is the classification of pots dependent on social contextualization, but also that pots themselves can function as contextualizers. The study of classification within archaeology is important because, as Miller writes, artifacts “embody the organic principles of human categorization processes” (1985, p. 1).

Classification as Practice-Based Even at its most scientific, the act of classifying ceramics is a socially situated activity; therefore, this study takes a practice-based approach to understanding the negotiation of pottery classification in varied settings. Practices, according to Schatzki (2001), are “embodied, materially mediated arrays of human activity centrally organized around shared practical understandings” (p. 2). A practice-based approach treats classifying not as a process that resides solely in the mind of the classifier, but as an ongoing activity that is “located, interested, conflictual, [and] meaningful” (Lave, 1996, p. 7). This kind of approach is particularly suited for investigating archaeological classification since recent studies have underscored the idea that meaning, as it applies to artifacts of material culture, is not fixed. Shanks (2007) explains that material culture “is indeed meaningful, but meaning is slippery, negotiated by makers, users, and interpreters” (p. 14). Practices are both constitutive of and constituted by the groups that engage in them. Goodwin (1994) describes the discursive practices within professional communities that create the “objects of knowledge” within a profession, to include “the theories, artifacts, and bodies of expertise” that distinguish one profession from another (p. 606). A practice, according to Goodwin, is “organized as a temporally unfolding process encompassing both human interaction and situated tool use” (1994, p. 607). Practices must be

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learned (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and there is often some give-and-take as this situated learning takes place. Therefore, the focus of a practice-based study is often the negotiations that take place as meaning (or, for the present investigation, classification) emerges while people talk about and interact with the material world around them. Practice-based studies look at how knowledge and social meaning are constructed discursively through the interaction of individuals in specific settings and contexts (Schatzki, 2001; Pennycook, 2010) applied here to various archaeological settings in which participants are involved in the classification of ceramics, focusing on how knowledge is constructed and transformed during different types of interaction. Pennycook explains that “practices are actions with a history” (2010, p. 2) that, in alignment with Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, are repeated and eventually appear ‘structured’ over time. Practices can thus be described as behaviors that constitute “regulated and sedimented social conduct” (2010, p. 28). One can see how, for classification practices specifically, repetition and interaction are the source of categories and category labels. Though it seems a bit of an understatement to say it, language plays a key role in the practice of classification, not only in the Whorfian sense that the labels that language gives us influence our worldview, but also in the sense that classification is something that we’re doing with language over and over in our interactions with other people. Language use plays a “dominant part” in archaeological codes, labels, and definitions, and it is through language that an archaeological site is “molded into a narrative” (Shanks & Hodder, 1995, p. 27). Language isn’t just a system full of pre-set labels, however; language is actively involved in the construction of the world around us. Archaeologists agree. Shanks and Tilley (1993, p. 261) explain that “language doesn’t merely imitate reality, rather, it helps to constitute it”.2

Methods How does one go about investigating a practice? Ethnography is a longstanding method in the fields of sociolinguistics, anthropology, and the areas in between. The initial assumption of ethnography is that “human action takes place always in a situation that confronts the actor and that the actor acts on the basis of defining this situation that confronts him” (Blumer, 1997, p. 4). The very idea of ethnography is that human action is always situated and that an effective way to study a situated practice is as a participant in and observer of that practice. Therefore, the thrust of data collection for the investigation that follows is through participant observation, with an emphasis on observations made of the events, participants, objects, and interactions within each setting. Professional archaeologist Matthew Edgeworth (2006) describes his own experience as a participant observer of an excavation, in which he focused on “practical transactions between archaeologists and unfolding material remains” (p. 3). Edgeworth notes the complex relationship between

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archaeologist and artifact, the latter being a “product of our own cultural activity as well as a product of cultural activity in the past” (2006, p. 5). Excavations are just the beginning of a continual process of artifact creation; material objects are transformed from ‘find’ to ‘artifact’ to ‘data’ and at each stage are conceptually (re)created. The interplay between archaeologists and material remains is also caught up in the kinds of knowledge and experience that excavation participants bring with them to the field. What Edgeworth found most interesting was: [. . .] the emergence of surprising, unexpected, contradictory, or difficult evidence, which rarely appeared in fully fledged form all at once but rather unfolded over time as it was being worked. Existing archaeological knowledge was being applied to shape and make sense of the material evidence at the same time as the material evidence was reshaping the knowledge that was being applied. Such two-way transactions, mediated socially and through the use of tools, were rarely discussed in conventional accounts of excavation and were mostly written out of excavation reports. (2006, p. 3) Encounters with “difficult evidence” may underscore the socially mediated nature of archaeological knowledge, but even more straightforward interactions with material remains offer the opportunity for the negotiation of meaning, classification, and knowledge. Holtorf’s (2002) ethnographic study of the ‘life history’ of a pottery sherd questions assumptions made in archaeology about the materiality of objects being studied, specifically, the assumption that “it is a realistic task for the relevant specialists to study the material properties of a thing in order to find out what it is [. . .] And then others can go further and think about what it meant in a given historical context” (2002, pp. 54–55). Holtorf suggests that the identities of things are instead “contingent” upon what we think we see, upon discussions and arguments about what things are, and upon changing circumstances and people (p. 55). The study of an artifact’s life history, then, is a study of how it came to be an artifact and an acknowledgment that “material culture is meaningfully constituted—in the present” (2002, p. 55). Holtorf concludes that archaeological classification is, as Ian Hodder (1997) has described it: “momentary, fluid, and flexible” (p. 691), even if it is considered a “scientific practice” (2002, p. 64). Ethnographic study allows one to look not only at the categories, identities, and meanings that emerge through the interactions of people with one another, but also the way that those same interactions are theory-making practices as well. In addition to the studies carried out by Holtorf (2002) and Edgeworth (2006), the present study has been informed by the research of linguistic anthropologist Charles Goodwin, who has employed ethnographic research methods to investigate the practices of oceanography and archaeology, and

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has written about the intersections of people, things, and meanings in a number of publications. Goodwin (1995) describes interactions on an oceanographic research vessel as “constituted through a range of temporally unfolding, work-relevant, situated practices” that arise from tool-mediated interactions (p. 237). Interactions between the scientists and sailors aboard the ship illustrate the navigation of a different kind of terrain: human cognition. For Goodwin, the only way to study “the ability of our species to secrete cognitive artefacts (including but not restricted to language) into the external world” is through the ethnographic investigation of the practices that serve as the infrastructure for cognitive processes (1995, p. 268). The knowledge, tools, and the science that emerge from the interactions on the ship are less things than they are processes that are situated, historically informed, and ongoing. Goodwin has also conducted research at an archaeological field school setting, looking at the ways in which language, image, gesture, and physical location combine to form the social practice of archaeology. His investigation provided an example of: how archaeologists construct the discursive objects that sit at the heart of their profession (such as features in the earth, maps of those features, categorizations of relevant phenomena, etc.) through socially organized practice that encompasses embodied action, language, and structure in the environment. (2006, p. 45) One focus of Goodwin’s work at the archaeology site has been the use of a Munsell color chart in soil descriptions (cf. Goodwin, 2000, 2006). For Goodwin, the Munsell chart is a “physical artifact that transforms the task of color categorization from an entirely mental activity into a process of comparing what is to be classified to a visible standard sample” (2006, p. 48). Goodwin’s analysis of the “talk-in-interaction” of two archaeologists working together to assign a color to a soil sample incorporates deictic expressions (“this one”) with embodied action (a pointing gesture) to “build a multi-modal, multisemiotic, meaning-making package in which sign systems in diverse media are brought together to create a whole that goes beyond any of its constituent parts” (2006, p. 51). The idea that meaningmaking involves many modes, both physical and linguistic, contributes to our understanding of how people and things are situated in the material world. Ethnography provides an analytical framework for the study of both “human cognitive life” and the human “ability to act within and upon the material environment” (2006, p. 54).

Plan of the Book The focus of anthropological inquiry has widened from ‘artifact’ to the ‘cultural production of knowledge’, for both the people being studied and the

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people doing the studying. This present work extends the line of inquiry suggested by Edgeworth (2006) by looking at different archaeological settings in which classification is taught, communicated, and negotiated. The ethnographic ventures I have undertaken can be conceptualized as stops at various points along the humanities-to-science continuum: a university course on ceramics classification, an archaeological field school, an intensive petrography course offered at the post-graduate level, and an archaeometry laboratory at a nuclear research reactor. Chapter 2 provides an overview of ceramics classification, from typology and seriation to ethnoarchaeological research to archaeochemical methods. The discussion of each approach is capped by a language-based comparison of written accounts of each type of classification in order to look at how language is used to create a basis for the categorizing of ceramic artifacts. Chapter 3 looks at data collected through an ethnographic experience in a university classroom, taught by a professor whose main method of ceramics classification is quantitative typology. Data for this chapter includes class lecture, exercises, exchanges between teacher and student, and a followup interview with the professor. Data collected via participant observation at an archaeological excavation is the focus of Chapter 4. Building on the idea of discursive category-making, this chapter shows how the practice of classifying continues to be taught (and negotiated) on site at an archaeological dig. Chapters 5 and 6 examine data collected from the ‘science’ end of the spectrum through discussions of participation in an intensive petrography course and a tour of an archaeometric laboratory at a nuclear research facility. These chapters demonstrate that even within these science-based analyses, category negotiation is taking place. Chapter 7 looks at how a contemporary potter looks at the classification of ceramics. This chapter focuses on the practice of pottery-making and the ways in which potters use language as an additional tool in the creation of their work. Finally, in addition to pulling together what we have seen in prior chapters, Chapter 8 considers a single set of potsherds from multiple perspectives in order to look at how different classificatory narratives can be created by different kinds of archaeological investigation. Overall, the driving questions of this work are these: what are we doing when we group things? What are we doing when we name things? What is the relationship between practice and classification? And, finally, what does it mean to say that archaeological artifacts are discursive objects?

Notes 1. There are, of course, notable exceptions (cf. Piaget, 1972). 2. Language itself is a practice whose appearance as a structured system has emerged over time through the interactions of its users (cf. Hopper, 1998; Kretzschmar, 2009).

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Introduction Echoing the observations of Shepard (1956), Orton and Hughes (2013) note three main eras of ceramics study: the art-historical, the typological, and the contextual. The art-historical era (loosely defined as lasting from nascent archaeology until the 1930s) approached “whole vessels as culture-objects” (2013, p. 5). The typological era (1930s on) treated the pottery sherd as a fossil and used sherds as a means of dating artifacts found in the same excavation strata. The emphasis of approach is on both vertical (chronological) and horizontal (regional) distributions. The contextual era (1960s on) focuses on pottery technology as a way of better understanding the behavior and culture of the potters themselves (2013, p. 5). What follows is an overview of these three eras of ceramic study, capped by a brief discussion of the current most popular means of ceramics classification: quantitative typology, ethnoarchaeology, and archaeochemical methods (such as petrographic analysis and neutron activation analysis). The discussion of the history and current state of ceramic study is complemented by a language-based comparison of written accounts of each type of classification.

Art-Historical Classification Before the culture-historical approach is adopted, the role of ceramics in archaeology was much like that of a butterfly under the collector’s glass. This era, the art-historical period in the study of ceramics, focused on whole pots and used names for the shape of the pot as the mode of classification. In addition, as this period was most heavily focused on Western pottery, the pot shapes have Greek names, such as amphora, krater, lekythos, olpe, etc. These names were intended to reference “typical” examples of each kind of pot, indicating, as Orton and Hughes (2013) note, that within this system of classification, “types were often defined in terms of their centers rather than their boundaries” (2013, p. 11). The Greek pot names, then, reflected what we could consider to be prototypical shapes that were then applied to real pottery forms in a way that demanded some flexibility, since actual objects can cause one to adjust categories.

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Two of the earliest formal classification systems were devised by German archaeologists. Hermann Dragendorff (1895) created a system for typing Roman pottery based on color, decoration, and the stamps used by different pottery workshops (which identified place of manufacture). Heinrich Dressel’s (1899) Corpus Inscriptionum Latinarum provides outlines and numbers for different types of Roman pottery shape. Based on the archaeological evidence available at the time, Dressel identified, for example, forty-five different types of amphora, a selection of which is presented as Figure 2.1. All of these vessels categorized as amphorae have two handles and narrow necks, but there is a lot of variation in terms of body shape, vessel length, decoration, etc. Several of the forms within Dressel’s drawings, including the types 5 and 6 found in Figure 2.1, are representative of a single archaeological find. Dressel also included information about vessel function (the vessels pictured in Figure 2.1 were used for storing wine) and date ranges for each type. British archaeologist William Matthews Flinders Petrie was working around the same time in Egypt, developing a “sequence dating” system for pre-dynastic Naqada pottery. Petrie (1901) offers nine pottery types: blacktopped, polished red, fancy forms, cross-lined, incised black, wavy-handled,

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Figure 2.1 Examples of Dressel’s amphora types Dressel (1899)

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decorated, rough-faced, and late. These types were presented in chronological order, as representative of ceramic evolution: The most clear series of derived forms is that of the wavy handled vases [. . .] Beginning almost globular, with pronounced ledge-handles, waved  [.  . .], they next become more upright, then narrower with degraded handles, then the handle becomes a mere wavy line, and lastly an upright cylinder with an arched pattern or a mere cord line around it. (1901, p. 5) The use of verbs such as “derived”, “beginning”, and “become(s)” demonstrate the application of Darwin’s theory of evolution to cultural items as well as biological features/species. By focusing on the transition of one type of vessel to another, Petrie was not trying to assign absolute dates to each pottery stage; he was instead offering a chronological progression that could be used as dating evidence for items uncovered in the same place (Figure 2.2). Petrie’s approach foreshadows the shift in focus that is to come in pottery study during the typological era that began in the 1930s.

Typological Classification Typology reflects a shift away from an artistic appraisal of whole pots to the use of potsherds as a means of dating other artifacts and assessing artifacts’ spatial distribution. “Typology”, of course, refers to the assignation of type designations to pottery vessels (or potsherds). As one can imagine, a number of different ways exist to define type and even more ways by which to ascertain what any particular type label entails. There are many different types of types. Krieger (1944) states that type indicates a “cultural trait” which means that type names identify “distinct patterns of behavior or technology” (p. 272) that can then be used to establish genealogical relationships between types, as in a family tree. Though not the first to do so,1 Krieger (1944) was a strong advocate for the development of a typological system to help manage the “masses of material” coming out of North American excavations of the Southwest (p. 275). Krieger argued for a simple system, one that would be easy to use in terms of both type names and type definitions, as he outlined the steps that one needed to take in order to deploy such a system after an initial sorting of the artifacts into groups that “look as though they had been made with the same or similar structural pattern in mind” (p. 279, italics original). The remaining steps that Krieger suggested are as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6.

Use strong contrasts to create smaller groups Divide those groups according to similarities between members Recombine groups in previous step that share a geographic distribution Test the categories, dividing or combining as necessary Name and describe what’s left Link types to cultural information (1944, pp. 280–282)

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Figure 2.2 An example of Petrie’s (1901) sequence-dating typology Petrie (1901)

Krieger noted that a typological system necessarily “preferences [. . .] some criteria over others” in order to determine major type divisions (p. 276). Such divisions can be made according to the frequency with which certain features appear, by “real or supposed historical changes”, or by the (arbitrary) intuition of the researcher (p. 276). Krieger also pointed out that the application of a typological system to actual objects often “forc[es] artificial

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lines” to be drawn between closely related vessels or, alternately, draws together a group of pots that are related only in terms of what attributes they don’t have (p. 276–7), such that there will always be a group of artifacts labeled as “miscellaneous” or “unclassified” (p. 282). As Krieger states, the challenge of the typologist, then, is to downplay variation in order to make general statements about pottery types and their relationship to a cultural context. Early- to mid-twentieth century American archaeology relied on typologies and the resulting genealogies to place artifacts into chronological sequences “according to ideas of ‘development’ ” (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 10). James Ford, an American archaeologist known for his work in the American Southeast, is often associated with visualizing the link between culture and time through seriation and percentage stratigraphy.2 Seriation is the use of form to measure time, while percentage stratigraphy measures time using the frequency of form types within a specific stratigraphical section. Seriation charts sometimes offer a visual display of the “life histories of types at a locale” (O’Brien & Lyman, 1998, p. 12) and may contain small drawings that illustrate the evolution of one vessel type over time. Any new vessels found could thus be dated given the pattern of development assumed in the seriation. The chart presented in Figure 2.3 is a generalization of the same kind of information, with the horizontal plane representing the occurrence of different pottery types by frequency and the vertical plane representing the passage of time. The “battleship shapes” communicate the idea that the popularity of a form begins gradually, peaks, and then falls off gradually in a pattern that overlaps at the edges with the presence of other forms.

Type_1

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Figure 2.3 A generalized seriation chart

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The nature of typologies more generally was the center of debate in American archaeology around the middle of the twentieth century, referred to as the ‘Ford-Spaulding debate’. In a series of articles in the journal American Antiquity, Ford (1954b) argued that the type is not a natural phenomenon, but is instead an analytical construct created by archaeologists, used as a tool for chronology-building and for understanding how cultures change. Spaulding (1953, 1954), on the other hand, argued in response that types were ‘real’ and could be determined statistically given the data. The debate over the nature of types is something that informs the present consideration of ceramics classification. The questions remain: Are there natural categories? Are types an ‘accident’ of the field? Do types simply reflect the needs or expectations of the archaeologist? Do types only exist as an analytical tool? Type-Variety Classification The idea of the pottery type was further refined by Wheat, Gifford, and Wasley (1958) in reaction to the proliferation of Southwestern pottery typologies. The kind of taxonomic system that they proposed, referred to as the type-variety system, is the product of making hierarchical, binary choices that divide pottery into wares and then diachronically into sequences and series as well as synchronically into ceramic systems, type clusters, types, and varieties. Ware is the most general term and represents the largest grouping of vessels that appear stylistically similar, both in terms of paste composition (i.e. clay, temper, inclusions) and surface finish (i.e. slip, glaze, decoration). A sequence displays the order in which ware types appear through time, while a series is a more narrow view of technologically related types that appear within a specific geographical locale. The focus, however, of the taxonomy proposed by Wheat, Gifford, and Wasley is the relationship between type and variety. Maintaining the term type as it had been used by Krieger (and others) to designate a recognizable cultural pattern, Wheat, Gifford, and Wasley (1958) more clearly defined variety as a sub-type that differs from other sub-types in terms of style or technology or by geographical or temporal distribution. A type cluster is a superordinate designation for a “constellation of types within which a type and its varieties are one unit” (p. 38). A ceramic system is a grouping of type clusters and is considered an “entity with cultural significance” that is characteristic of “a given culture at a given time” (p. 39). Depending on the research question at hand, the perspective can be broadened or narrowed. The purpose of creating such a system was, according to its authors, to be useful to the archaeologist and as such the system was designed to be flexible enough to “permit the breaking of working entities into the smallest units required” (p. 45). The type-variety approach to pottery classification has persisted, especially within American archaeology, partially because of its flexible nature. Adams (2008) notes that the type-variety system was always intended to be “ever expanding, self-correcting, and always leading to new insights” (p. 223).

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Though archaeologists continue to use classification schemas such as the type-variety system and its descendants, the focus of inquiry into archaeological ceramics shifted during the mid-twentieth century to an emphasis on the intersection of type classifications within historical and cultural contexts. It is important to note that the typological approach to pottery (and the debate surrounding its nature) is associated with American archaeology. In Britain and in Europe, the main unit of ceramic study remained the ware, a looser kind of designation that groups together vessels similar in form. The term ware can be used to indicate different aspects of pottery categorization. For example, the British Museum contains pieces of pottery described with the word ‘ware’ to reference the following: place of manufacture (e.g. Mill Green ware), clay ingredient (e.g. jasperware), glaze ingredient (e.g. salt-glaze ware, titanian ware), attributed potter (e.g. Martin ware, Doulton ware), appearance/color (e.g. pearlware, lustre ware, creamware), and cultural association (e.g. Persian ware, Jun ware, Imari ware). Orton and Hughes note that the use of -type ware can then be used to “designate a sort of penumbra or fuzzy area of uncertain fabrics grouped around a known ware” (2013, p. 11). The Victoria and Albert Museum ceramics collection uses “-type ware” descriptions for pieces whose temporal and geographical origins are fairly certain, but whose maker is unknown, such as “Yaozhoutype ware” or “Swatow-type ware” for pieces from unknown Chinese artists and “Gombroon-type ware” made by unknown artists from Iran. Quantitative Typology Carla Sinopoli (1991) in her textbook, Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics, explains that there can never be a single typology for all ceramic classifications. Color, for example, would not be a helpful attribute to use for categorization if all of the pots under consideration are black. The challenge is to determine when, and at what points, different colors indicate “meaningful variation” (1991, p. 44). Sinopoli uses color gradation to explain: If vessels grade from light gray to dark gray to black, with no discrete cutoff points, the archaeologist must attempt to identify why such a continuum exists and whether distinctions between light gray and black represent random or patterned variation in the inventory. (p. 44) If one determines that color as an attribute does indicate meaningful variation, then the next step is to decide how to measure that variation. Sinopoli explains that qualitative measurements work for data that fall into discrete sets (e.g. red, black, white), but continuous data (such as the aforementioned gray scale) demands a quantitative measurement, which in the case of color measurement, would be the use of a Munsell chart, a system used to specify colors based on hue, value, and chroma (1991, pp. 44–46). Discrete and continuous data look different. Figure 2.4 presents a set of visualizations

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E 1

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Figure 2.4 A discrete assemblage (left) and a continuous assemblage (right) Adapted from Cowgill, 1982, pp. 32–33

(after Cowgill, 1982), one of which is an assemblage that falls into easily typed clusters of objects (i.e. a number of discrete data sets), while the other is an assemblage that is “not perfectly typable” (i.e. a continuous data set). About the neatly clustered data of the discrete assemblage, Cowgill comments that “real data rarely behave this well” and that the best-case scenario is to group assemblage members together such that “most members of the subset are more similar to at least most other members of the same subset” than they are similar to members of another subset (1982, pp. 32–33). Cowgill notes that, even if you can devise a typology, there will always be objects that remain unclassifiable, because they are transitional and fall between types or because they are simply deviant (p. 33). Sinopoli adds the caution that, even if one encounters what appear to be discrete types, there is still the possibility that the data at hand are not representative of an entire community, because, although a small sample size may yield discrete types, a larger sample size from the same site could easily present only “fuzzy” categories (1991, p. 56). Sinopoli also suggests to her student-readers that there is no one right way to type pottery, and that all data analysis should be undertaken as part of a “reflective process” (1991, p. 67). In the end, both Cowgill and Sinopoli advocate typologies that can be verified statistically. Cowgill suggests specifically the use of cluster analysis and regression analysis, while Sinopoli (writing almost a decade later) prefers the use of statistics that use vessel measurements (rim diameter, maximum vessel diameter, vessel height) or a ratio of those measurements (e.g. height to maximum diameter) (1991, p. 56). Even without the use of statistics, specific types of vessel measurements have been used to quantitatively assess pottery such that one can compare inter- or intra-group pots. Hodder (1979) plots measurements of maximum body width and vessel mouth width on an X-Y axis in order to visualize differences between three Kenyan tribes’ pottery (Figure 2.5). The graph illustrates that, though the groups’ pottery is similar in terms of pot height, the Kokwa pots generally have a smaller mouth width than the pots of the Chebloch and Tot. As represented

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cm

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Figure 2.5 Plot of body width (vertical) to mouth width (horizontal) for the Kokwa (dark circles), Chebloch (open circles), and Tot (triangles) Hodder, 1979, p. 15

in Figure 2.5, Hodder’s data appears neither canonically continuous nor discrete; instead there are clusters whose outer members overlap, with black dots tucked in within the cluster of clear dots and triangles. Vessel measurements are further abstracted by the slice method, a form of principle component analysis, which normalizes pot height in order to compare dimensions along 100 ‘slices’, represented as an X on a graph for each vessel. Figure 2.6 is an illustration of three such components: 1) ratio of maximum diameter to height, 2) the height of the maximum diameter, and 3) the distance from maximum diameter to rim. These three components comprise the majority of variation between pots (e.g. one burial urn study in Great Britain found that, of 100 pots, “93% of the variability is accounted for” by these three components, with the first component alone accounting for 79% of the variability [Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 196]). The results of principle component analysis can be used as one aspect of a larger examination of the relationship between form, style, and grave goods. The drawback of any kind of slice analysis, however, is that it only works for whole vessels, and cannot be applied to pottery sherds (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 196). Clearly, the key to any kind of quantitative typology is variable selection. Choosing different variables—or using different statistical methods—can result in the creation of typologies that are altogether different. Whallon (1982) illustrates the effect of statistical methods on typology, using the

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Figure 2.6 An example of principle component analysis Richards, 1987, referenced in Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 195

measurements of eleven variables from scale drawings of 61 vessels (p. 140). Figure 2.7 contains a stylized pot with those eleven measurements noted. Whallon looked at these variable measurements in three different ways. First, he applied cluster analysis to the data “in an attempt to define vessel types directly from the original variables”; that is, to see if ‘natural’ categories arise from comparing and grouping the vessels according to the eleven measurements (1982, p. 146). The results of cluster analysis are depicted in Figure 2.8. Figures 2.9 and 2.10 contain twelve and sixteen categories, respectively; a quick glance at the forms in each category show some overlap, but a lot of variation. The categories in Figure 2.9 were created using vessel height and rim diameter as determining factors, while those in Figure 2.10 were based on vessel size and the ratio of neck height to rim diameter. Although Whallon’s

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Figure 2.7 Variable measurements: 1 = total height, 2 = rim diameter, 3 = crosssection, 4 = neck diameter, 5 = height to neck, 6 = belly diameter, 7 = height to belly, 8 = base diameter, 9 = belly excurvature (a), 10 = height to (a), 11 = diameter at (a) Adapted from Whallon [1982, p. 140]

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Figure 2.8 Cluster analysis results: eleven categories based on eleven attributes Whallon, 1982, p. 146

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Figure 2.9 Measurements of the principle components of vessel height and rim diameter results: twelve categories based on two attributes Whallon (1982, p. 147)

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Figure 2.10 Measurements of vessel size (square root of cross-section) and shape (ratio of neck height to neck diameter) results: sixteen categories based on three attributes Whallon (1982, p. 148)

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argument was that the measure of simple vessel size yielded what were, statistically speaking, the ‘best’ categories, the results of the exercise illustrate the crucial role of attribute selection in the creation of a classification system. The final area to be addressed within quantitative typology is what to do when dealing with potsherds (instead of whole pots). In this case, quantitative measures aim to determine how much pottery is found at a particular site (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 203). There are four ways to measure the amount of pottery at a site: sherd count, sherd weight, number of vessels represented, and vessel equivalent. All of these measurements rely to an extent on a typology that indicates what types of vessels are expected to be present and the level of ‘brokenness’ that can be expected from each type. The last two measurements in particular rely on a typology as sherds are sorted into families (sherds from the same type of pot), which can be nuclear sherd families (same type of pot, same physical context) or extended sherd families (same type of pot, same site). Because there might not be enough sherds to puzzle-piece the pot back together, an estimation of vessel representation (EVREP) might be used as quantitative data. The EVREP can be determined by using a rim chart to estimate pot diameter given only a few rim sherds (Orton & Hughes, 2013, pp. 209–210). In their explanation of quantitative typology, Orton & Hughes (2013) make a point of mentioning that answering the obvious question, ‘Are these two sherds from the same type of pot?’, appears “to depend as much on the psychology of the worker as on the nature of the pottery” (p. 78). There are ‘lumpers’ (people who tend to assume sameness) and ‘splitters’ (people who tend to assume the opposite). Either way, the interaction between the person doing the sorting and the reality of what is being sorted can pose challenges. Orton and Hughes describe the sherd sorting process: Frequently what seems to happen is that the worker defines two apparently distinct types [. . .] but finds to his (her) dismay that the space between them is gradually filled by a chain of intermediate types until it is difficult to sustain the original distinction. (2013, p. 79) This description speaks to the difficulty of categorization and is in many respects applicable to the practice of classifying ceramics as a whole. Add to that the fact that researchers at different sites often modify existing typologies (or construct new ones), and the result is a myriad of typologies that may only be relevant to one area or may only be useful in answering a specific kind of research question.

Contextual Era Typology in Context The contextual era can be characterized as the first in a series of “serious attempts to integrate ethnographic studies, scientific techniques, and aspects

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of technology into mainstream pottery studies” (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 13). Anna Shepard’s (1956) work Ceramics for the Archaeologist is heralded as a benchmark archaeological study. Not only does the book include a chapter titled “Problems of Pottery Classification”, but also the work solidified a new way to look at ceramics that synthesized information about “chronology, trade/distribution and technological development” (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 12). Although noting that several archaeologists (including Jim Ford, c.f. Ford, 1954a) had already remarked that typologies were largely the creation of typologists, Shepard expressed dismay at the fact that many of her contemporaries still held to the idea that types were “cultural entit[ies]”, and thus treated type classifications as the reflection of ‘natural’ categories that had a “basis in reality” (1956, p. 308). Shepard explains that one of the problems with typological classification is the fact that the “role of the potter” is often excluded from archaeological discussions (p. 309); she suggests a focus on the technical aspects of pottery-making, such as the choices a potter makes in terms of clay and temper, the techniques used in building and shaping clay, and the technolog(ies) employed in the firing of clay vessels (p. 310–11). Taking these aspects into account would thus bring potters and their decision-making to the fore. With an acceptance of the inherent imperfection of classification, Shepard suggests that a discussion of variation—whether in the form of “persistent modifications” or “normal fluctuations—would be helpful (p. 317). She finds that stabilizing forces— both environmental (e.g. the natural resources available) and cultural (e.g. long-standing community traditions)—contribute to the persistence of particular forms or techniques (p. 318). On the other hand, variation in pottery form or technique can arise from the individual potter’s “capacity, experience, skill, taste, independence, and originality”, or by accident, or from the discovery of new materials, or through contact with other peoples (p. 318). These kinds of considerations, Shepard argues, would get type classification a little closer to being reflective of culture. Shepard’s argument helped to revamp the idea of the pottery type and perhaps because of that, the type-variety system persevered—with modifications. Rice (1976), for example, argues that the concept of a pottery “ware” (at the top of the type-variety system described previously) should be re-evaluated. Rice’s argument begins with the claim that paste composition and surface finish should not be combined as technical attributes, because they represent two very different sets of choices that a potter makes: the “selection of materials” (paste composition) and the “steps of manufacture” (surface finish) (1976, p. 538). She presents a number of strategies for dealing with the “ambiguous role” that the ware concept occupies: considering type, variety, and then ware (versus ware, type and then variety); re-defining ware in terms of something like surface “feel” (e.g. ‘waxy’ versus ‘glossy’ for Preclassic and Classic Mayan pottery, respectively); or dividing the ware concept into paste ware and surface ware. Two interesting points to take from Rice’s argument are 1) her re-thinking of the ware concept arose, as she describes it, from her own practice, and 2) her arguments reflect the

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shift in thinking about pottery, not as examples of Type X, Variety Y, but as the product of potter choices. In that way, “an artifact represents a series of decisions, choices or learned behavior on the part of the maker, and that these decisions may be based on criteria which have objective reality apart from the cognitive system” (Rice, 1976, p. 543). Another typological approach to ceramics evaluates pottery types in relation to their potential function. The idea of considering “Pots as Tools” was first suggested by Braun (1983), who underscored the need to consider the mechanical elements of pot manufacture and use, because variation in pottery types might be due to variation in the mechanical demands placed on them. Braun explains that the manner in which contents are put into and taken out of a container, how those contents are manipulated while they are in the container, and what kinds of physical stresses are placed on the container all affect vessel composition, finishing, and style (1983, p. 109). Braun’s perspective was an attempt to bring together seemingly disparate methods of ceramics analysis, including archaeochemical analysis and the consideration of style as “visual communicative behavior” (1983, p. 109). Building on Braun’s ideas, Hally (1986) incorporates ethnographic data about the food habits of Southeastern Native Americans, noting that the “size and shape of the vessel would vary with the nature of the food itself, the size of the household or group to be fed and the context in which consumption took place” (1986, p. 272). Hally discusses thirteen morphological types, noting the ‘size classes’ found for those types; for example, a “large pinched rim jar” would be used for long-term storage for large quantities of food or liquid, as evidenced by its large size (which would be hard to move), pitting on the inside of the vessel, and the wide vessel mouth (that could be covered and is wide enough to avail the use of a scoop) (1986, p. 285). The approach taken by Hally is illustrative of the typology trends of postprocessual archaeology, where the emphasis is on multiple ways of ‘knowing’ and ‘interpreting’ the past. The discussion about the nature of types themselves continued into the 1990s. Are types “real” units or simply theoretical ones? There is, as Chilton (1999) suggests, a difference between “designing” a system and “discovering” one (p. 44). Chilton uses the pottery of the American Northeast as an example of the issues that can arise when one tries to apply the types of one region/culture to the pottery of another. A typology for northeast pottery could answer questions about the age of potsherds and about the cultural groups that produced them, but what if your question has to do with what choices a potter made and how those choices “manifested in the finished vessel”? How can those decisions “be understood [. . .] within a cultural context?” (p. 46). Chilton argues that the choices are framed by a specific technical and social system. For example, Iroquoian pottery consists mainly of thin-walled cooking vessels that were fairly uniformly made and were large enough to feed a lot of people, while Algonquian pottery was smaller, sturdier, less uniformly made, and used mainly for transporting and storing

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goods. These differences between the groups’ potteries reflect differences in their political systems. The Iroquoian community was more sedentary and pots were made as a household industry, a “joint effort of women within the matrilineage” (p. 59), for whom uniformity entails a positive social message. Algonquian groups, on the other hand, were smaller, more mobile, and had more fluid social boundaries, a situation which can give rise to competition and for individual expression. For Chilton, the technical choices involved in pottery-making reflect a pottery ideology, not a pottery typology and, as Hally (1986) suggested, the only way to discover this kind of information is through ethnography. Krause (2016) problematizes many terms and definitions that form the foundation of ceramic typology, including attribute and artifact. The former Krause explains as a matter of researcher perspective, defining ‘attribute’ as a property of an artifact deemed ‘integral’ to that particular artifact (p. 8), while the latter is defined as the result of a “sequence of patterned behavior” that “constitute[s] purposeful action” (p. 11). Despite his view of an archaeological artifact as a “material object conceptualized by the members of a social group as belonging to a category that is part of the cultural repertoire for that group” (p. 23), a view that has an emic ring to it, Krause proposes a fairly complicated pottery morphology formed from the basic understanding of a pottery vessel as something with “two sides, outside and inside, and one edge, the lip” (2016, p. 27) and using the lip as the main reference point for measuring the body (all vessel that is not lip), shoulder (the maximum circumference), and the bottom (the minimum circumference) (p. 27). Krause’s typology is stripped down to pottery atoms and Krause himself uses a linguistics analogy to explain his combinations of “terms, symbols, strings, and rules”, which end up looking like syntactic phrase structure rules. As an example, take the ‘equation’ for defining the exterior (Ex) of a pot: [(P) (V) (S+)] to mean that the exterior of a pot is “that surface of a pottery vessel that is proportionally the greater” (p. 31). Similar formal descriptions are presented for each vessel part and for decorative units. These descriptions are then linked to diagrams that outline a base/bottom morphology, a rounded shoulder morphology, and angular shoulder morphology, a rim morphology, a lip morphology, etc. Using these morphologies, Krause sorts his Caribbean pot sherds according to their similarities, thus forming categories from which to create types, such as Cedrosan Saladoid Ware, Cuevas Style Cedrosan Ware, and an Ostoinoid Series (which has two subseries). Building his types in this manner, Krause finds that his ‘ground-up’ categories don’t match that of other Caribbean ceramics researchers (p. 191). In his conclusion, however, Krause does say that of the specimens found in what temporally speaking should have been a ‘Cuevas’ layer, “the vast majority

40

Ceramics Classification

of the ceramics (roughly 89%) [. . .] could not be identified as Cuevas without redefining the taxon” (p. 194). These not-typed styles “represent an as yet unnamed style” or they “seem to be prefiguring the emergence of early wares” of another series (p. 194). Even with Krause’s objective, highly detailed system for deriving, assigning, and describing pottery types, the pots themselves resist the typology. One of the main critiques of the typological approach to pottery study has been directed at the assumption that changes in ceramic technology indicate changes in culture and that those changes can be detected through the study of pottery sherds. Arnold (1988) states the problem succinctly: “potsherds are not cultural units of behavior” (p. 6). Arnold argues that the typologies are based on an “atomistic/analytic/mechanistic paradigm” and that drawing conclusions about culture based on potsherds, which are “broken up into attributes and then clustered and reassembled as abstract ‘types’ ” is both reductionist and arbitrary (1988, p. 4). Currently, typology tends to be viewed more as a tool than an end unto itself; the types under investigation are chosen in order to answer specific research questions and to address specific issues such as production technique, vessel function, economic distribution, and social meaningfulness. The typological approach still exists, but is now more likely to be incorporated into larger analyses that focus less on individual artifacts (or kinds of artifacts) and more on artifacts as part of a larger assemblage (Orton & Hughes, 2013, p. 23). There is within typological analysis a continued emphasis on context, especially economic and environmental contexts, which form a theoretical bridge to ethnomethodology, an approach that tries to answer questions about how “ceramics articulate with the rest of culture” (Arnold, 1988, p. 2). Ethnomethodology Parallel to the growth of the contextual era within typology was an expansion of ethnomethodology, which can be conceptualized as having two parallel strains: ethnoarchaeology and ethnotaxonomy. Ethnoarchaeology is a research strategy that works on the assumption that “archaeological interpretation is founded and ultimately depends upon analogy”, which means that ethnographic research from the present is applied to archaeological remains of the past (Davis & Kramer, 2001, p. 2; also cf. Stiles, 1977). In terms of ceramics, the focus of inquiry is not the pottery itself, but the potters and their relationship to their environment and their culture (Arnold, 1988, p. 17). Ethnoarchaeological research includes the investigation of “firing techniques, pottery distribution systems, ceramic use, breakage, deposition, as well as the social conditions of pottery production and distribution” (Sinopoli, 1991, p. 164). Ethnotaxonomy, on the other hand, utilizes ethnographic methods to investigate a group of people or a particular practice as it relates to the conceptualization of that group or practice and often entails the development of a folk taxonomy (see the section titled “Ethnotaxonomy”).

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41

Though ‘ethnoarcaheology’ was used as a term (and as an approach) as early as 1900 (cf. Fewkes, 1900), this methodology did not take hold in archaeology until the mid-twentieth century, where it “re-emerged [. . .] as ‘action archaeology’ [or] ‘living archaeology’ ” (London, 2000, p. 2). Stiles (1977) is a fairly early proponent of the ethnoarchaeological approach, laying out a process for the comparison of ethnographic data “to an analogous set of archaeological data” (p. 94) in order to develop or test hypotheses about the behaviors of and/or physical conditions in which a past people lived. As it has continued to develop, ethnoarchaeology has remained focused on people, material culture, and the relationship between the two; this approach offers the opportunity to situate material findings within cultural, social, and personal contexts. London (2000) emphasizes the analogous relationship between past and present in laying out the ethnoarchaeologist’s reward: “rather than speculate on the use of fragmentary artifacts or buildings, one sees the complete artifact in use and the person behind it who made or uses it” (p. 7). In this manner, ethnoarchaeology is about context, and not just the human context of artifact production and use. Arnold (1988), for instance, adopts a “systems paradigm” in which the relationship between artifacts is of greater importance than the artifacts themselves (p. 13). In other words, Arnold suggests that the how of organization is more important than what is being organized (1988, p. 13). From this perspective, cultural systems are viewed as “dynamic organisms” and an ethnoarchaeological approach incorporates a broad view of ‘context’, to include the study of the environment, technology, material culture, looking, for example, at the ‘feedback loop’ of potters and their physical environment (p. 17). Perhaps because of its awareness of many facets of ‘context’, this approach seems predisposed to self-reflection, as can be seen in Arnold’s (1988) definition of ceramics as “purposeful creations of potters who use clays to produce objects which are recognized by archaeologists as pottery” (Arnold, 1988, p. 16, emphasis added). This definition underscores the creative power of the archaeologist in labeling ceramic objects (or in the case of excavations, ceramic sherds) as “pottery”, a label that may or may not reflect the labels and understandings of the makers and users themselves. This is where ethnotaxonomy comes into play. Ethnotaxonomy A series of ethnographic studies, mostly from the 1980s, investigated ethnotaxonomy, the terms that the actual pottery makers and/or users have for their vessels. Rice (1987) discussed a number of ethnotaxonomical studies that, taken together, yield a couple of cross-cultural commonalities. Generally speaking, pottery category names primarily reflect the vessel’s function or “projected use” with names that “combine several dimensions simultaneously: size, shape, specific functions and contents” (p. 278). For instance, in everyday contexts, a vessel might be referred to as a bowl, a small bowl, a rice

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Ceramics Classification

bowl, or a mixing bowl. Rice suggests that ethnotaxonomical labels are “situation specific”, as the labels for different kinds of vessels act as “phenomenological, empirical, and pragmatic group identifiers based on use rather than ideational, conceptual, or analytical classes based on abstract similarity relations” (1987, p. 279). Ethnomethodological approaches emphasize the idea that categories and classifications arise through use rather than through a pot’s position in a field of related vessels. What name is assigned to a particular vessel emerges through its use, sometimes changing if the vessel has suffered a break, other times varying according to the vessel’s contents (Rice, 1987, pp. 279–280). Studies of folk classification systems for ceramics also tell us more about the nature of categorization itself. Kaplan and Levine (1981) examined the ethnotaxonomy of black-on-red pottery from Puebla, Mexico, conducting open-ended interviews with twelve master potters who together identified twenty-five different pottery types, based on ninety-four features. Kaplan and Levine used this information to create a folk taxonomy, took that taxonomy back to the potters for confirmation, and then ‘tested’ the taxonomy again with photographs of pots, showing them to potters and other city residents. Using multivariate analysis and cluster analysis, an overall taxonomy of pots was produced that revealed two major divisions between pottery types, according to the dimensions of open forms versus closed forms and the presence/absence of multiple handles. They identified twenty-five pottery types as the result of a cluster analysis of the raw data. Some of the pots were grouped together based on openness or closedness, while others were grouped together by size. Interestingly, two of the categories were grouped by cluster analysis even though the categories contained forms with multiple handles and those that had no handles. The folk taxonomy created by Kaplan and Levine was then linked to traditional ethnographic data that was able to add an interpretation of vessel types (e.g. open vessels being associated with women, closed forms with men, etc.) (1981, p. 876). The finding that the presence or absence of handles was a major determinate of pottery type was notable because this evaluation differed from the rim-based classifications discussed by other researchers working with indigenous pottery (e.g. the Arikara of North Dakota, studied by James Deetz). Around the same time that Kaplan and Levine were discussing pottery types in Puebla, Mexico, Kempton (1981) was sharing the findings of his two-part investigation of the folk classification of pottery types in Tlaxcala, Mexico, using ceramic miniatures and measured drawings. Kempton’s study ultimately advocates for a model based on Rosch’s prototype theory (see Chapter 1), which suggests that categories are anchored by a relatively invariant core that speakers generally agree on surrounded by a various and graded periphery of less agreed-on category members (cf. Rosch & Mervis, 1975; Rosch 1973, 1975). Kempton describes the categories that he finds as “graded from prototypical examples in the center to atypical ones at the fuzzy boundary of the category” (1981, p. 4).

Ceramics Classification

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To begin his investigation of pottery classification, Kempton first asked his informants to sort and name ceramic miniatures, asking at times for clarification on why they chose the names they did for specific objects. In this manner, Kempton uncovered what he called “internal inconsistencies” such as one female informant who labeled a miniature pot as a “jarro, pero jarro con pico” (“jarro but jarro with a spout”). When Kempton asked her about the difference between a jarro and a jarra, she explained that “si tiene pico es jarra, y si no tiene, jarro” (“If it has a spout, it is a jarra; if it does not have one, a jarro”). Pushed for additional information, she stated that it was the “fatness” of that specific pot that caused her to use that label, even though vessel girth had not been part of any folk (or dictionary) definition of jarro before (1981, pp. 37–39). From his research, Kempton concluded that the nature of a folk classification is interactional, as folk definitions are “drawn from natural interaction among members of the same speech community [. . .] they serve the needs of the folk in natural contexts, not the externally defined needs of lexicographers or anthropologists” (1981, p. 39). Kempton used measured line drawings for the second part of his study instead of physical objects, because he felt that his informants were more inclined to sort objects into groups rather than to name forms (1981, p. 41). Kempton’s drawings are ‘measured’ in the sense that they reflect gradations of vessel height and width, as well as the presence of a spout and handle(s). Figure 2.11 is a sample page from Kempton’s drawings. Each of the ten sheets has seventy-two line drawings that show gradual changes in height

Figure 2.11 An example of Kempton’s drawings Kempton (1981, p. 205)

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Ceramics Classification

and width. More radical differences, such as the presence or absence of handles and spouts, differentiate the sheets from each other. Kempton elicited initial classificatory information from seventy Tlaxcala informants by asking questions that would direct him to a general vessel name for each sheet (e.g. “What do you see here?”). The ten pages elicited a total of 177 distinct terms, only thirteen of which were given more than ten times. The majority of the terms were offered by only one respondent; many of these were compounds (e.g. olla molera, olla de Oaxaca) which Kempton explains were “idiosyncratic and probably ad hoc” (1981, p. 70), which is similar to the observation made by Rice (1987). For use as the general term for each drawing sheet, Kempton chose the five most frequent terms (olla, cazuela, florero, jarro, jarra). Once the general vessel names were established, Kempton presented the drawing to his informants and asked them to point out simple members, focal members (e.g. the “best” examples of that category), peripheral members (e.g. the “sort of” members of that category), leaving the rest as “non-members” (Kempton, 1981, p. 49). Figure 2.12 is an example of the responses that Kempton obtained from the “olla” sheets for one informant. Focal members are shaded, simple members are indicated by solid lines, and peripheral members are indicated by dotted lines. One of the examples that Kempton provides from his individual interviews is of an informant who replied to his instructions to “show [him] the best example of an olla” with, “What is this ‘best example’ business? They are all ollas; it just depends on how it is going to be used” (1981, p. 57), again underscoring the importance of use in everyday classification. In this case, the informant chose all of the drawings on two sheets. Most of the time, however, informants made more specific selections. Figure 2.12 contains two sheets with one informant’s “olla” selections. As we see in Figure 2.12, the informant has indicated six of the vessel shapes on these two sheets as focal (C5, D6, D7, E5, E7, F5 on Sheet 4), while another fifty were considered simple members of the “olla” category, and an additional four were deemed peripheral olla examples. Note that the indications of both focal and peripheral examples are non-continuous (i.e. the informant did not simply indicate a range of examples but instead chose specific drawings for the categories of ‘best olla’ and ‘sort of olla’). Upon compiling individual results for each of the five vessel types, Kempton found general agreement among respondents as to which drawings best represented each general category. This agreement, however, was best expressed not in terms of absolute category membership, but rather in terms of ‘percent agreement.’ Figure 2.13 contains two visualizations of this agreement. On the left is a chart that shows what percent of the informants labeled each of the corresponding drawings on Sheet 4 as “olla”. On the right is the resulting ‘contour map’ that indicates the level of agreement between speakers about which drawings are ollas. Kempton had the opportunity to re-interview five of his informants and found that their selections of simple, focal, and peripheral examples of

Ceramics Classification

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Figure 2.12 One informant’s indication of “olla” on Sheets 2 and 4 Kempton (1981, p. 60)

“olla” and “jarra” (for example) were different at different times. Figure 2.14 contains the “jarra” sheets filled out in July (left) and October (right) by a single informant. A comparison of the choices made by this informant from the forms on Sheet 2 shows that only three designations (of D3 as focal and of C2 and E2 as simple) were the same on both occasions. There was more overlap with the forms chosen on Sheet 3, but there were still significant differences in both the number of forms that could be labeled as jarra

15

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SHEET 48

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OLLA SPANISH.

0

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GDC > 2

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9

Kempton (1981, pp. 72–73)

Figure 2.13 Percent of informants who chose each drawing as an example of “olla” (left) (1981, p. 72) and resulting contour map for Sheet 4 (right) (1981, p. 73)

2

1

Kempton (1981, p. 108 [left] and p. 110 [right])

Figure 2.14 One informant’s “jarra” sheets on July 9 (right) and October 7 (left)

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Ceramics Classification

and in terms of what kind (focal, simple, peripheral) of jarra a particular form represented. Kempton’s findings suggest that, even for an individual, categories and category membership are not fixed; they arise from situated interaction. Even for an individual, classifications are “momentary, fluid, and flexible” (Hodder, 1997, p. 691). Historical Archaeology and Ceramics Though definitions do differ, historical archaeology is archaeology associated with sites for which there is related documentary evidence. In the U.S., though, this designation is often used to refer to the archaeology of postcontact situations (so U.S. archaeology can be divided into pre-Columbian and historical archaeology). The historical archaeologist has both the advantage and the challenge of incorporating documents into her typologies. Barber (1994) notes that having historical documents does not necessarily make the classification of artifacts easier, as the documents might “not serve the same purpose in which the archaeologist is interested” (p. 133). Andren (1998) is in accord, stating, “the relation between artifact and text is neither unambiguous nor static” (p. 146). Texts themselves can be artifacts, but for both written texts and physical objects, “all meaning springs from context and all contexts are in one way or another constructions” (1998, p. 155). Historical documents cannot simply be treated as ‘guidebooks’ for the classification of excavated artifacts; however, the complex relationship between text and artifact notwithstanding, historical archaeologists have been able to use estate inventories, for example, to support the classification of ceramic finds at colonial excavation sites. Mary Beaudry and colleagues, in their work with artifacts and estate inventories of the Chesapeake, set the standard for integrating documentary evidence into an archaeological typology for ceramics (cf. Beaudry et al., 1983). The Potomac Typological System (POTS) was devised to “systematize the chaos in the categories used to describe excavated ceramic vessels and the assemblages they comprise” in a way as to “make the cultural dynamics behind them more accessible” (Beaudry et al., 1983, p. 18). These authors explain that previous work in the Chesapeake area has discussed “cups, mugs, pitchers, bowls, and who knows what else” and at the same time has evoked categories that are “unconsciously employed in our own day-to-day transactions, often supplemented by notions inherited from the late 19th and 20th century antiquitarians and collectors” (1983, p. 20). Much like Rice (2005), Beaudry and her colleagues are warning against using modern terms that enact schemas that could be somewhat misleading or even wholly inappropriate. In addition, Beaudry et al. caution that using familiar terms especially may cause researchers to feel “little need for theoretical or methodological reflection” (p. 20). POTS was derived from an attempt to match excavated vessels to terms used in estate inventories from the same time and place. The English colonists who settled in the Chesapeake brought

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knowledge of various European pottery forms with them and then “applied relatively standardized uses and names to them”, discriminating more or less finely as was needed in different situations (p. 26). Colonial names for pottery forms were, in other words, part of an emergent process. From the estate inventories, Beaudry et al. make a series of basic type divisions that reflect interactions between form (hollow versus flat) and function (e.g. drinking, eating, cooking, dairying): hollow vessels for liquids, hollow vessels for liquid and semi-solid foods, flat vessels for food, miscellaneous dining vessels, cooking vessels, and vessels for the dairy and kitchen. Within these type categories are specific parameters for sub-types (e.g. a “dish” is used for round, flat vessels that are more than 10 inches in diameter, “plate” for those that are 7 to 10 inches in diameter, and “saucer” for those that are 4 to 7 inches in diameter). The general divisions were able to marry what was found with what was inventoried. In addition, Beaudry (1988) uses the concept of markedness to talk about the use of modifiers to indicate culturally valuable attributes such as composition, age, size, capacity, function, color, shape, weight, contents, and condition (p. 45). She notes that, over time, more and more modifiers appear within estate inventories, which to her suggests that the presence of specialized vessels increases as time goes by (1988, p. 49). Years later, citing the work of Beaudry and colleagues as inspiration, Gibble (2005) surveys the utilitarian pottery wares of southeastern Pennsylvania and creates a “term-to-vessel” attribution system (p. 33). Gibble’s system also divides pottery into categories according to vessel use, naming her categories as such: food production, food storage, food distribution and consumption, beverage distribution, beverage consumption, health and hygiene, and an extra miscellaneous “other” category (p. 38). Within Gibble’s types there are sub-types, within which one finds the same specific criteria used by Beaudry for items such as “dish”, “plate”, and “saucer” (p. 39, 41). In general, the terms Gibble uses in her typology are similar to those used in the POTS system for Chesapeake types, though there are some differences. Table 2.1 contains a comparison of types from POTS for seventeenth-century Chesapeake ceramics to Gibble’s types for eighteenthcentury Pennsylvania vessels. The two typologies have seventeen terms in common, a few minor differences (e.g. drinking pot versus drinking bowl, milk pan versus milk pan/basin), and some terms in the eighteenth-century list that reflect the popularity of Chinese designs and styles that spread across Europe and to the colonies in the early 1700s (e.g. oriental-shaped bowl, tea bowl, tea pot). Emic and Etic Whether dealing with historical records or with ethnoarchaeological data, the relationship of etic and emic typologies is not a simple one. Rice (1987) noted that the academic concept of the type becomes somewhat smudged

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Ceramics Classification Table 2.1 A Comparison of Historical Archaeological Classifications of Ceramic Vessels Beaudry et al. (1983)

Gibble (2005)

basin bottle bowl candlestick caudle cup chafing dish chamber pot colander cup dish drinking pot ewer flask/costrel galley pot jar jug mug milk pan pan/pudding, pastry, patty, etc. pipkin pitcher plate porringer pot/butter pot punch bowl salt [dish] saucer sillabub pot

basin bottle bowl chamber pot costrel (canteen, flask) deep bowl dish drinking bowl galley pot jar jug large shallow bowl milk pan/basin mug oriental-shaped bowl pipkin pitcher plate porringer pot/butter pot pudding pan/patty pan saucer tea bowl teapot

when joined with enthnoclassification. In theory, types should reflect the intentions of the culture and should both “reproduce archaeological classification and represent the artisan’s ‘mental template’ ” (p. 284). Rice warns that the categories perceived by the ethnographer may or may not reflect a so-called mental template and that the folk categories themselves are “too fluid and context-based” to be part of an objective system of classification anyway, which is why she advocates a quantitative typological approach choosing carefully the attributes used for typing, based on the research question at hand (1987, p. 284). Houston, Stuart, and Taube (1989) report that, although it is possible to use textual materials (in their case, Mayan pottery texts) to devise an emic classification system, one finds that such folk classifications often “cross-cut form and function in a highly variable and idiosyncratic manner” and that terms by users of pottery differ from those used by the potters themselves and differ further depending on the social group of the informant (1989, p. 725). Houston et al. conclude that, “native or

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emic classifications are fascinating for their cultural richness, but not necessarily fruitful for the archaeologist who wishes to organize ceramics in an analytically useful fashion” (1989, p. 725). In the end, “analytically useful” takes precedence as the basis for typological systems, partly because of the assumption that emic categories are too fluid and flexible to be used as the basis of a scientific inquiry.

Archaeochemistry In addition to typological and ethnographic methods, a number of archaeochemical methods can be employed in the study of ceramics. These methods examine the clay crystals and particulates that are too small for the naked eye or for a low-powered magnifying glass. Archaeochemical methods include: • • • • •

Electron microscopy (clay minerals) X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy (crystalline structure of clay minerals) Neutron activation analysis (trace elements) Atomic absorption spectroscopy (trace elements) Petrography (nonplastic inclusions, pores)

From these kinds of methods, one can identify the minerals, rocks, and (in some cases) the elements present in an archaeological sample. These methods can be applied to the archaeological ceramics in order to address questions about the composition and origin (or provenance) of ceramic raw materials, the method of ceramic manufacture, and, if applied within a wider framework, patterns in human behavior. Neutron activation analysis (NAA; also referred to as ‘instrumental neutron activation analysis’, or INAA) uses uranium fission to make a pottery sample radioactive. The rate of decay of the isotopes is measured at intervals over time, and the recorded amounts of gamma radiation present at each interval are used to determine what elements (including trace elements) are present in the sample. NAA is accurate to 1 ppm (parts per million) for some elements, which makes it both the “gold standard” for geochemistry and highly susceptible to contamination. The usefulness of NAA for archaeological ceramics is dependent on the maintenance (and continued expansion) of large databases that catalog the geographical distribution of elements for comparison. Ceramic thin-section petrography can be used to group samples into categories (i.e. to create a system of classification), to create descriptive characterizations of those groups, to offer an interpretation of pottery provenance, and to aid in technological reconstruction. Thin-section petrography requires that the researcher be able to identify the mineral and rock components present within a prepared section of a ceramic vessel using a plane polarizing light microscope.

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Artifacts as Categories (and Beyond) Miller (1985) is a postprocessual benchmark in the archaeological study of ceramics. For Miller, the classification of pottery goes beyond the “sheer number of categories created from the clay itself” (1985, p. 9). Miller found that the pieces of pottery alone could not be used as the basis of a typology or classification system. Instead, he reports that the pottery under investigation “exhibits a plasticity and flexibility that [. . .] is subject to complex manipulation” long after it has been produced (1985, p. 140). Miller describes pottery as a semiotic code (e.g. for food, social caste, gender), teasing out relationships between different kinds of pottery and socio-cultural categories, yet he warns that these associations are not the end-product of an examination; they are instead a heuristic through which the larger questions can be positioned: “Pottery is an artificial creation, whose acknowledgment as an active material intervention requires a more positive ‘constructivist’ model of the members of the society which are its context” (1985, p. 158). Miller notes that the pottery vessels were found to “work both as frames and within frames” (1985, p. 9, emphasis original). A specific vessel might only be labeled as ‘ceremonial’ within the ceremony itself and at the same time, the ceremony schema is activated, in part, by the presence of that specific type of vessel. Because the concept is so flexible, schemas afford room for both the fuzziness of boundaries and for the (re)creation of social meaning through repetition. The idea that pottery types (and their labels) are subject to cultural schemas suggests that ceramic types (and their labels) are emergent products of specific interactions. Interactions between potter and materials, between pieces of pottery and specific situations and users, and between the ethnographer/archaeologist and the people and objects being studied are all part of a greater swirl of interaction and meaning-making. One example of on-site emergence can be found within ethnoarchaeologist. S.E. van der Leeuw’s (1991) article about interviews conducted with a number of native potters. During the interviews, van der Leeuw asked about composition, techniques, variability, and mistakes in the pottery-making process. As a prologue to his discussion of variability in pottery, he describes a simplified scene that characterizes several conversations with his potter-informants: I would ask the potter, “Is this crack in the bottom of this pot due to lack of nonplastic material in the paste?” The answer would be an unconditional “Yes”. A little later I would ask, “Is this crack in the bottom of this [identical] pot due to the technique used?” Again, an unqualified “Yes”. Some time later, I would remark on another crack in the same place in the products of the same potter, and would tentatively attribute it to the vessel’s shape. Again, the answer would be an unmitigated affirmative. (1991, p. 11)

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Van der Leeuw’s conclusion about this kind of interaction was that his “mention of an effect would, as it were, trigger a host of potentially associated variables in the mind of the potter, some of which were mentioned and some of which remained unspoken” (1991, p. 12), which is a good example of how the processes that occur during interactions (diagnoses, classification, etc.) are emergent phenomena.

A First Look at Language Use Borrowing methods from corpus linguistics, this chapter’s final section takes a first look at language use in conjunction with the different means of pottery classification discussed previously. To do this, a mini-corpus was constructed by combining two-chapter selections from seven different texts that have as their primary focus the archaeological study of ceramics. The texts from which the selections were taken are the following: • • • • • • •

Rice (2015) Pottery Analysis, 2nd edition—general, ~22,000 words Quinn (2015) Petrography: The interpretation of archaeological pottery and related artifacts in thin section—archaeochemical, ~20,000 words Steponaitis (2009) Ceramics, Chronology, and Community Patterns— quantitative typology, ~18,000 words Sinopoli (1991) Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics—general, ~13,000 words Longacre, ed. (1991) Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology—ethnomethodology, ~23,000 words Shepard (1956) Ceramics for the Archaeologist—typology in context, ~22,000 words Wren (1914) North Appalachian Indian Pottery—art historical, ~22,000 words

The average length of the selections is 20,000 words, although the number of words per selection ranges from ~13,000 to ~23,000, a range that reflects differences in chapter length between texts. Two of the selections, Rice’s Pottery Analysis and Sinopoli’s Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics, are from general texts, and the other five selections came from texts that represent different eras or approaches in archaeological ceramics, beginning with Wren (1914) as representative of the art historical period and ending with Quinn (2015), which focuses on thin-section petrography. Table 2.2 contains the twenty most frequently occurring words in the corpus created by combining the seven text selections. Note singular and plural forms were consolidated and words frequently found on corpora ‘stop lists’ because of their ubiquity (e.g. function words, forms of “to be”, etc.) were not included. It is no surprise that three of the four most frequently occurring words in the combined corpus are terms for the object of study itself: vessel(s),

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Ceramics Classification Table 2.2 Twenty Most Frequent Words in the Corpus (Text Selections Combined Amounted to ~140,000 Words) Rank

Word

Total

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

clay vessel(s) ceramic(s) pottery section(s) material(s) used inclusion(s) firing potter(s) thin mineral(s) fabric(s) made sample(s) site(s) size(s) color(s) surface(s) high

997 618 587 493 343 335 317 274 243 213 188 186 173 156 155 152 150 149 140 137

ceramic(s), and pottery. The most frequently occurring word in the corpus was clay, likely because introductory chapters from each text were part of the text selection and these chapters often contained information about the pottery formation process. To see how different archaeological perspectives on pottery manifest through language use, the individual selections can be considered in comparison to both the corpus as a whole and to each other. Table 2.3 contains lists of the ten most frequent words found in each of the text selections. Five of the seven selections have the words clay(s) or vessel(s) as their most frequent. The remaining two selections have the words section(s) (Quinn, 2015) and women (Longacre, 1991) as their most frequently occurring words, a clear reflection of their focus on archaeochemistry and ethnomethodology, respectively. The representative selection chosen for the art historical era, Wren (1914) is one that shares its most frequent words with most of the other selections. The other most frequent words from this selection paint a picture of an archaeological writer concerned with who made the pottery (Indian(s) is the third most frequently occurring word), where the pottery was excavated (found, north), and what size pots were found (inch(es), high). The art historical approach is also reflected in the frequent use of the word plate(s), which refers not to a vessel form but instead to the book’s numerous illustrations. The word list from the Shepard (1956) selection, a work considered, as mentioned previously, a benchmark in the study

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10

273 166 160 157 86 68 63 54 44 43

Sinopoli (1991)

clay(s) 312 vessel(s) pottery 97 ceramic(s) mineral(s) 92 clay(s) rock(s) 69 material(s) potter(s) 58 Firing ceramic(s) 54 potter(s) high 51 technique(s) particle(s) 42 used fired 40 figure vessel(s) 38 use

Rank Rice (2015) section(s) ceramic(s) inclusion(s) thin fabric(s) clay size(s) sample(s) archaeological petrographic

Quinn (2015) 343 290 274 188 173 122 117 113 100 97

vessel(s) Moundville mound(s) shell(s) number(s) sherd(s) strength(s) surface(s) figure(s) clay(s)

151 118 74 60 58 57 55 54 49 47

Shepard (1956)

women 111 clay(s) calabash(es) 107 paint(s) milk 102 oxide(s) pottery 60 firing decorated 58 Iron used 58 color(s) different 50 mineral(s) cattle 49 pottery decoration 49 material(s) Ilchamus 48 temperature(s)

Steponaitis (2009) Longacre (1991)

Table 2.3 Top Ten Most Frequently Occurring Words per Text Selection

315 133 129 117 113 95 94 84 77 69

vessel(s) pottery Indian(s) inch(es) found north plate(s) high pot(s) made

156 127 125 119 91 73 69 66 65 63

Wren (1914)

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of archaeological ceramics, evidences the shift from the art historical era to the typological. Instead of the most frequent words being ones that can reference whole pots such as those found in Wren’s work (vessel(s), pottery), the most frequent word in the Shepard list is clay(s), which aligns with a shift in focus to the composition of pottery and the more technical aspects of pottery production (paint(s), oxide(s), iron, color(s), mineral(s), material(s), temperature(s)), including the technical aspects of pottery decoration. Steponaitis (2009) represents a furtherance of the typological approach to ceramics. As an example of a quantitative approach to typology, the most frequent words from this selection reflect an investigation of a single site with a specific kind of ceramic composition (Moundville, mounds, shell(s), number(s)), one with crushed or ground shell used as temper. The quantitative element of this approach is seen not only in the word number, but also in the frequent occurrence of sherd(s), strength(s) (i.e. how easily different types of pottery break into sherds), and surface(s) (as surface decoration is one of the means by which sherds can be typed). The word lists from the two general reference texts (often used as textbooks for courses on the classification of ceramics), Rice (2015) and Sinopoli (1991), contain similar terms (clay(s), potter(s), ceramic(s), fired/firing, vessel(s)), yet they differ in a way that seems reflective of the near 15-year difference in publication. Sinopoli’s earlier work has the word material(s) as its fourth most frequent word; material(s) is used so frequently in this selection, in fact, that it accounts for 47% of occurrences of the word in the corpus as a whole. In Rice’s selection we find the words mineral(s), rock(s), and particle(s), which are words that offer a more specific description of the materials that are found within ceramic composition. This shift from a more general descriptor of “material” to more specific names for types of materials could reflect the increased application of petrographical and other archaeochemical methods to pottery between the early 1990s and the present. Quinn (2015) deals with thin-section petrography, which again is reflected by the most common words found in the text, specifically section(s), inclusion(s), thin, fabric(s), sample(s), and petrographic. Obviously, thin, section(s), and sample(s) are the technical terms used in petrography to refer to the medium of study. Inclusion and fabric refer to the specific aspects of pottery composition that petrographers are trained to observe and describe. What we see in this short list of words is a summary, if you will, of the primary concerns of this specific type of ceramic study. Longacre (1991) is an ethnoarchaeological study conducted in Kenya, as we see reflected in the words women, calabashes (a calabash is a gourd-shaped vessel), milk, cattle, and Ilchamus (the name of a tribe in Kenya). These particular words, especially alongside the other most frequent words of this selection, decorated/ decoration and the verb used, suggest a theme that has more to do with people and their active relationship with the pottery than one that has to do with the properties of ceramic materials.

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The examination of word lists such as these offers a simple way to relate language use to the practices of different sub-disciplines within archaeology. These different archaeologies have their own interests, their own research questions, and their own ways of using ceramics vocabulary. Clearly, there is a long history and broad background for the classification of ceramics in archaeology. This chapter has dealt with a cross-section of the published (i.e. written) academic discourse about ceramics classification in order to set the stage for the discussions that follow, which deal with classification ‘on the ground’. In the chapters that follow, we look at classification as an emergent process within conversations, within individual interactions, and against specific backdrops.

Notes 1. Earlier North American typologies include Holmes (1903); Merwin & Vaillant (1932); and Gladwin & Gladwin (1930). 2. Although often credited with the rise in popularity of seriation and percentage stratigraphy, Ford did not necessarily employ the methods in his own work (O’Brien & Lyman, 1998, p. 2).

3

Teaching Classification Classroom Typology

Introduction Because of its prominence within archaeological research, the practice of ceramics classification is an important element of the larger enterprise of learning how to be an archaeologist, an exercise that is socially situated whether it takes place in the classroom, in the field, or in the laboratory. Wenger (1998) describes practice as transcendent of the “traditional dichotomies that divide acting from knowing, manual from mental, concrete from abstract” (p. 47) and, as this chapter demonstrates, learning the practice of archaeology calls on classificatory knowledge to bridge the gap between the mental and physical by way of lessons that bind together content with the physical manipulation of objects and artifacts. In reference to the classroom context specifically, Wenger explains the ‘practice of practice’, stating that, “things have to be done, relationships worked out, processes invented, situations interpreted, artifacts produced, conflicts resolved”, adding that the doing of these things always involves the “embodied, delicate, active, social, negotiated, complex process of participation” (1998, p. 49). Practice, then, is part and parcel of human interactions, being both constitutive of and constituted by the interactive contexts in which they occur. In addition to looking at the use of a Munsell color book in archaeology, Charles Goodwin also studied color assignation and the development of “embodied competence” in a geochemical laboratory setting where students are being taught how to undertake a specific task that involves a color judgment (1997, p. 118). Learning is “embedded [. . .] within social interaction” (p. 121) as the professor guides students whose “judgments of what constitutes the proper shade of black are calibrated within the work group [. . .] The notion of what can count as black is not static but rather something that is progressively shaped and modified as participants inspect the changing materials they are working with, while interacting with each other” (p. 122). Physical instruments are not the only tools involved in examining materials; Goodwin also discusses the development of category systems as a tool (1997, p. 134). Both physical and cognitive tools, then, will be part of our examination of how student archaeologists are introduced to and taught to deal with ceramics within their future discipline.

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Backdrop: Native American Ceramics of the American Southeast To understand the teaching and practice of classification in the classroom, one must look at the larger academic context in which it takes place. Every classroom is situated within a larger regional, departmental, and professorial backdrop. The class that is the subject of the discussion that follows is situated within a Sociology and Anthropology Department at a southeastern university; the majority of the anthropologists in the department do research in archaeology and cultural anthropology. The professor that taught the course I participated in is an archaeologist who does research at prehistoric Native American sites. Within southeastern archaeology there exists a plethora of typology systems, some of which refer to the same types by different names. The situation is presented candidly on the website of the South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA): As practiced in South Carolina (and elsewhere) ceramic analysis varies widely. Some researchers apply type names they learned at the feet of the legendary Dr. ____ of the University of ____ without really giving specific definitions. A sherd of pottery will be referred to as “Deptford” for instance, with a reference given to Dr. A’s groundbreaking research and we are left to assume it really matches his description. This is not meant to diminish the contributions or impact of these elders in any way. However, just like potters, archaeologists create ‘communities of practice’ where we learn from the elders and pass our knowledge along. This has led to many of the problems we face in trying to understand pottery, and thus culture, as old Dr. A and his students might disagree with Dr. B and his students, and end up calling the same pottery by different names. (Steen and Smith, online) The idea that archaeologists create a community of practice (CoP) to study and discuss the products and behaviors of another CoP becomes only more meta-referential when one considers that the product of the present-day CoP (an emergent classificatory system) is meant to overlay the pottery that emerged from the original CoP. This statement from the SCIAA also underscores the idea that students are academically ‘raised’ a particular way, which means that one of the factors that contributes to the emergence of classificatory practices is the training that scholars receive as students. That training (the knowledge that is passed from teacher to student) then has to be applied to specific tasks and to issues that the student-now-researcher encounters in a new situation. And so every new situation generates its own version of the typologies that the ‘elders’ developed. The SCIAA website, in fact, lists ninety-three separate types of Native American pottery from North and South Carolina. For the Deptford-type

60 Teaching Classification pottery in South Carolina, just to take one example, there are ten subcategories, some of which are divided further.1 The challenge that this presents is that it is often not clear whether researchers at different sites are talking about the same types of pottery. Or whether different researchers using the same types are indeed talking about the same thing. The terminological choices made by archaeologists are in part a reaction to the artifacts they find at their specific site and are also a reflection of their individual research interests. The SCIAA website also references Anderson (1996), which, in addition to the chapters that one expects in an edited volume, contains a transcript of a late-night discussion between a number of preeminent archaeologists who specialized in the ceramics of Native American groups in North and South Carolina. This informal discussion contains a number of references to “typology as a process” (p. 3), as well as the need for consistence, repeatability, and congruence of categories across researchers and sites. One of the participants makes the point that, with no common set of categories or descriptions, “what we have now are reports that make use of four or five different taxonomies, so without a guide to the reports and taxonomies we have no idea of what most people are talking about” (1996, p. 4). Though the researchers involved in the conversation advocated for different kinds of classification systems (e.g. systems that were paste-based versus surface finish–based, etc.) one point of agreement was the importance of linking typology to culture through the creation of meaningful categories. The classroom is a community of practice in which students are taught how to do things the way their professor does them (both implicitly and explicitly), though at the same time, the goal of a typology-based ceramics classification course is not necessarily to teach students to type ceramics a certain way, but instead to teach them how to make meaningful categories that can then be applied to future classification-oriented interactions (as well as their course assignments). Of course, what a ‘meaningful category’ might be is also emergent; in some cases it might refer to categories that are widely recognized and understood, while in other cases it might refer to categories defined by repeatable criteria (or both).

Typological Lessons Data for this chapter were collected via participant observation of an upper-level archaeology course on the classification of ceramics. The course was taught as a split-level class that contained both undergraduate anthropology majors as well as graduate students in anthropology, twelve students in total. The class met in the university’s archaeology laboratory, with walls lined with shelves containing boxes of bones, rocks, and artifacts. The instructor, “Dr. M”, is a seasoned archaeologist who worked as a professional archaeologist before entering academia. Her research focuses on borderland chiefdoms of the Mississippian period in the American Southeast, with emphases on the production and cultural significance of

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ceramics, shell beads, and domestic architecture. Dr. M teaches this course for her department on a regular basis, and this particular version of the class met only once a week for three hours. Dr. M employed a range of teaching methods, including short lectures, group work, student-led discussions of reading assignments, and experiential learning activities. Intended as a general introduction to pottery classification in the field of archaeology, the course description included on the syllabus stated that the class would cover “traditional typological concerns as well as more modern analytic methods” that would be “used to ultimately identify issues of production, exchange, function, design, social interaction and technological and stylistic evolution”. Topic-wise, the course began with discussions of the “general theoretical perspectives” of ceramic analysis, ultimately narrowing to the application of quantitative typology. A series of early course readings and lectures addressed archaeochemical methods, including petrography, X-ray diffraction (XRD), thermal analysis, and other “chemical methods” (optical emission spectrometry, X-ray fluorescence [XRF] spectrometry, and neutron activation analysis [NAA]) and included a rundown of the advantages and disadvantages of these methods, though Dr. M stated afterward that archaeologists of the American Southeast tend to stick with “happy typologies”. The class did discuss two articles (Stoltman, 1989; Steponaitis, Blackman, & Neff, 1996) that make use of archaeochemical methods, not to create new types, but to further delineate existing typologies. Still, Dr. M returned to the point that these methods “never took off” in studies of the American Southeast. Introducing Typing Dr. M’s initial introduction to the practice of typing involves students doing typing. On the first day of class, students were given one each of six different kinds of cookies and crackers and, without further instruction, were asked to “sort them”. After sorting, they were asked to go around the room and explain their cookie/cracker piles: some had sorted by shape (round, oblong, square), color (light brown, dark brown, white), brittleness, or by presence/ absence of filling. A couple of students had piles that allowed Dr. M to talk about ‘lumpers’, people who simply split between sweet (cookies) and savory (crackers) and ended up with two categories, and a couple of students’ divisions were used as examples of ‘splitters’, because they had ended up with six different categories. This particular task keyed into students’ basic knowledge of sorting and was aimed at awakening individual awareness of personal tendency (e.g. “it helps to know if you tend toward lumping or splitting”). This kind of meta-awareness also gives students a sense of themselves as classifiers who have to negotiate objective reality, some preset classification system, and their own subjectivity. This is the beginning of students’ introduction to the practice of a practice.

62 Teaching Classification After eating the cookies and crackers, the students were given pottery sherds to sort and instructed to come up with criteria for their sorting (i.e. categories or types) and to label each pile by that criteria. The resulting student-determined categories were as follows: a) b) c) d) e) f) g) h)

Color and flecks (red, gray, two-toned) Flat, blocky, blackish, fiddly bits that don’t match Color-based (three groups) Tiny shredlets, decorated, plain, rim sherds Five color categories and one subcategory (texture: smooth or not) Color, texture, striation Two categories “by design” and one sherd off to the side Three categories (form, body, rim), temper, surface treatment, also some “remnants and residuals” i) Temper, form, decoration, and had “one piece of stone” j) Plain-ware versus decorated, wall thickness and temper k) Decoration, fired clay, coarse types From the different sortings, one can see a variety of criteria/labels that indicated a range of experience with the subject matter. Novice ceramicists gave terms such as color, flecks, texture, and design, which are general and fairly basic, what Goodwin (1997) refers to as the “off-the-shelf tools [of] the general lexicon of language” (p. 123). The novice classifiers are also the ones who came up with the more inventive terms shredlets, blocky, and fiddly bits, which seem to indicate an attempt to be more specific, even without knowledge of more technical terms. The students who had prior exposure to ceramics used more technical terms, such as striation, body, rim, temper, surface treatment, plain-ware, and decoration. Part of the practice of ceramics classification is clearly the guided emergence of a vocabulary that is discipline specific. During Dr. M’s lectures on pottery formation and decoration, students very often had examples literally in hand. For example, class members were each given lumps of clay to ‘play with’ during the lecture on raw materials. During this lecture, Dr. M made references to the consistency of “hand clay” as opposed to clay that is to be wheel thrown (which must be thicker and drier). The students were shown a couple of methods for hand-building a pot, namely slab-building and coiling. While the students were working the clay, Dr. M talked about the importance of uniformity in pot-making; if a pot isn’t fashioned with a uniform thickness, it will crack when it is fired. Dr. M tied her lesson to what the students were doing with their hands, explaining that uniformity is achieved, “by the forming that you’re doing right now”. Students were also provided with a set of “finishing tools” so they could stamp, cord-mark, and/or incise their formed pieces. (The pots were signed, left to dry, and were later fired.) After the students had cleaned up from their own pot-making, Dr. M passed around sherds of finished

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pots whose surfaces were decorated with the same types of tools. The effect, and the effect on students’ understanding of classification, is a connection between the process and the product: the doing that creates the categories. Tools for Participation (a.k.a. “Everyone Gets Glue”) In one sense, the course was framed as an introduction to the tools needed for participation in the practice of classification. The only material tool students were required to procure before the course began was a 10× magnification hand lens; the remaining tools were either handed out by the professor or created by the students themselves as part of one of the first hands-on activities. During this activity, every student (including myself) was handed a plastic bag that contained a nail, a glass tile, a small piece of copper tubing, and a blank index card. The nail, copper tubing, and glass tile (all objects that can be purchased at a local hardware store) can be used as tools for determining the hardness of a ceramic surface according to a hardness scale (from 1 to 10) developed by Friedrich Mohs, a German geologist. Used to describe the scratch-resistance of minerals, the hardness numbers of ceramics normally fall between 2.5, which is a surface that can be scratched by a fingernail, and 5.5, which can be scratched by a knife or nail; the copper tubing and glass tiles fall in between, at hardness numbers of 3 and 4.5, respectively. The index card was used during class to make a “grain size chart”. A series of sieves with gradually smaller openings was set over a tray of sand; these sieves were used to make batches of progressively smaller grains, which were then passed among the students. We were instructed to place four drops of glue down the side of the index card to hold the grains in place in order of size (coarse, medium, fine, very fine). Students were thus in charge of producing for themselves one of the tools for typing (Figure 3.1). Creating the grain size chart was a process in and of itself—a doing that created a tool to aid classification. Students conferred with one another during this exercise, often looking at their neighbor’s actions and cards for affirmation that they were “doing it right”. The end result was that everyone created their own card to use as a reference in determining grain size. Each card was different, yet each individual chart was able to communicate (basically) the same information. This brings us back to the point that, when teaching students how to do classification, teachers tell students not only what to look for, but also how to see it. Or how to feel for it. Dr. M consistently provided physical samples of pottery types, potsherds with specific attributes (e.g. soot or cord-marking), and tools for pottery-making. Toward the end of the term, along with her presentation of rim types, she drew on the board the outline of rounded, tapered, and beveled lips, passed around examples of each, and directed students to compare them carefully, explaining that “you have to pick them

64 Teaching Classification

Figure 3.1 My set of typology tools

up and touch them to tell” which type of rim is which. The application of a label to a specific sherd emerges from interaction with physical reality; classification is a tactile experience. This idea is then reflective of Goodwin’s idea of the ‘discursive object’ as the object itself is an agentive element of its own classification (2006, p. 45). Other tools for typing potsherds include ‘standard’ (i.e. frequently used) charts and diagrams that are used to describe specific pottery attributes. Figure 3.2 contains reduced-size examples of these charts. Moving clockwise, we have a rim chart for estimating rim circumference using one potsherd; a Munsell book that is used to indicate the color of a clay surface or temper; a chart based on Powers (1953), which is the standard for determining temper particle roundness and sphericity; a temper particle density chart used to estimate the percent of temper within the clay (this one is adapted from Rice, 1987 though several different versions of this chart exist); and a firing atmosphere chart from Rye (1981, p. 116) that presents “stylized cross sections” of pot sherd cores that align with different firing techniques (e.g. a dark band within a potsherd cross-section indicates that the pot contained organic matter within the temper and was fired under incomplete oxidizing

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Figure 3.2 Sample charts used as typing tools for archaeological ceramics

conditions). All of these tools call on the examiner to compare visual images with the sherd being typed. Using any of these tools requires researchers to shift their gaze back and forth from the chart to the sherd, adjusting their assessments of color/roundness/density as they turn the sherd over in their hands, examine its edges, or examine it in a different light. The interaction between the physical elements of the sherd (and environment) is the process from which a label emerges. Course Assumptions and Questions The teaching (and learning) of classification practices is situated not only socially within the classroom but also within a set of academic parameters. Another important set of ‘tools’ employed in classification practices comprises the assumptions and questions that undergird a researcher’s approach to a group of ceramic artifacts. Based on the observations and notes made

66 Teaching Classification during Dr. M’s course, listed next are some of the assumptions and questions that served as a backdrop to the course’s approach to typing and categorizing pot sherds: Assumptions •

• • • • •

Pots are what they need to be (“if your 3-year-old has shit running down his leg, then you don’t have time to turn your pot that’s on the fire at regular intervals”) The way a pot is made tells you what it was used for Rim sherds tell you more about a pot’s shape than body sherds Pottery is a way of identifying yourself (and your tribe) against other frontier chiefdoms What’s added to the clay is added on purpose The end result (the pot) is based on a series of decisions that are informed by resources, environment, culture, etc.

Questions • • • • • •

What choices does the potter make? Why make it that way and what does that tell you about culture? What is the thought process of the potter? (“think about how long it takes to cook beans—very long”) How many kinds of vessels are present in a society? How and when would the pottery-making happen? Do the potters use the same materials for all the different kinds of pots or do materials vary with intended use?

These assumptions and questions form the basis of the classification process. What one finds is that the process of placing archaeological objects into categories begins before any artifacts are found. Obviously the assumptions of any discipline inform how a researcher views her data, but in this case, the specific assumptions just listed are anchored by an interest in potter behavior and the classifications that are the end result will reflect this. For example, the assumption that “pots are what they need to be” preferences classification by shape: the shape of the vessel being produced depends on the plan for its use, whether for cooking, for storage of a solid or a liquid, as a scoop or plate, or as a vessel that you need to be able to move. The questions that you intend your research to answer (again, in this case, aimed at addressing potter behavior) are also reflected in the categories you choose. Categories, rather than being ‘real’ things, are a vocabulary that you can use to answer questions.

The Typology The arrangement of topics on the syllabus and the content of course lectures suggest that the typology being taught centers on vessel function, as

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determined by direct evidence (e.g. organic remains, use wear, sootmarks) and indirect evidence (e.g. vessel composition, vessel shape). The primary course text, Prudence Rice’s Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook, addresses this topic, introducing it with the statement that “in their general role as containers, ceramic vessels are tools” (2005, p. 208). Function is the thing that binds together the physical vessel and the people that made and used it, and language is the thing that characterizes that relationship. Form and Function How does one determine what specific function a tool was fashioned to undertake? Rice addresses the relationship between form and function in a way that touches on how labels affect archaeologists’ understanding of a piece of pottery. Forgive the rather lengthy quote, but it’s worth looking at Rice’s gentle caveats to using familiar, contemporary terms for prehistoric vessels: A low, open ceramic vessel will be called a bowl by analogy to the bowls in modern kitchens [. . .] differences between this bowl and another vessel that by the same reasoning might be categorized as a jar are not always well understood and are often contradictory, but they provide a description and predictive framework for establishing what a particular class of prehistoric vessels look like and how they may have been used. [. . .] The application of more familiar generic terms such as bowl and jar introduces a different set of problems. One is that these terms tend to ascribe a particular function without clear indications that such was the vessel’s intended use. Terms such as storage jar, cooking pot, and serving bowl leave little doubt as to their supposed use, but they reinforce the implicit association of form and function: each of these binomial terms combines a use category with a shape category. Another problem with familiar terms is their subjectivity. In the absence of explicit criteria, it is often difficult to distinguish between a bowl and a basin, or between a jar and a vase. As a result, these common terms—which carry significant weight in describing the appearance of the vessels in question and inferring their use—are often useless and imprecise. Still another difficulty is that many complex vessel shapes defy labeling by these familiar terms. (2005, pp. 211–212) For my purposes, the takeaway from Rice is that classifications entail a schema. When you call something a “bowl”, whatever culturally based ideas that you have about bowls are then mapped onto that object. Whatever function(s) and purpose(s) that a bowl has in your own experience are transferred onto objects being referred to as a ‘bowl’. Classification thus entails

68 Teaching Classification more than ‘cutting up reality’. Even if it is unintentional, placing a category label onto an object also overlays a schema. Even referring to something as a “vessel” enacts a schema; the concept of containerization is just that, a concept. Dr. M tells her class to use labels such as “bowl” and “jar”, but warns that these terms imply function when, in fact, the actual function of the vessels is unknown. She notes that making judgments about “bowl versus basin” or “jar versus basin” is tricky, but for practical purposes, they should defer to Rice’s designations. Two supplemental articles were assigned alongside the Rice chapter for the unit on pottery function, one of which discussed directly the identification of pottery function, whereas the other examined the relationship between variability and typology. The latter article, Schiffer and Skibo (1997), addresses the categorization of formal variability (i.e. “an artifact’s observable, often measurable, physical characteristics”), a system that had not previously had means to account for how a pot was formed or what might have happened to the pot during use (1997, p. 28). Schiffer and Skibo focus on potential interactions between technical choices made by a potter, the formal properties of pots, and the “performance characteristics” of finished pots (1997, p. 31). The formal properties of ceramic vessels include all of the ways that pots can vary “through time and across space”; for example, for the cooking pot, the classification system would include observations of “orifice diameter, body shape, rim shape, capacity, temper (kind, size, amount), wall thickness, and interior and exterior surface treatments (incising, polishing, etc.)” (1997, p. 28). Interactions between these properties and less measurable phenomena (the choices that potters make and things that happen to pots as they are used) would then be ‘plotted’ against one another and fashioned into what Schiffer and Skibo call a “correlate matrix” (p. 32). The authors suggest that it would be possible to “systemize the set of correlates for any kind of artifact” though at the time the article was written they state that “we cannot yet provide a correlate matrix for the clay cooking pot (it would consist of hundreds of principles), but the abstract concept is still useful” (1997, p. 32). To my knowledge, no complete example of a correlate matrix has ever been designed, though other archaeologists and anthropologists continue to appreciate the concept of intertwining the “constraints, opportunities, and potentials that guided the behavior of artifact makers” with the physical remains of the artifacts they made (Bleed, 2001, p. 153). As a sociolinguist, one of the things I appreciated about the correlation matrix proposed by Schiffer and Skibo is the concomitant understanding that “behavioral variation [is] something to be expected” and not because variation is caused by “inscrutable ‘cultural’ factors” but instead, variation “results from people trying to solve the problems of everyday existence—conceptualized in terms of activity-specific interaction and performance—in different behavioral, social, and natural environments” (1997, p. 45). Variation is the human default.

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A Temporal Infrastructure For Dr. M and other archaeologists who work in the American Southeast, there exists a chronological backdrop to pottery classification, a ceramics phase sequence of the area that is the result of sixty-plus years of archaeological work (see King, 2003). During the Mississippian period (800–1600 CE), the American Southeast was home to a large population of moundbuilding Native Americans who formed a loose trading network that radiated outward from the Mississippi River Valley. Archaeologists have divided the Mississippian into the early (1000–1200 CE), middle (1250– 1325 CE), and late (1375–1500 CE) periods. These divisions have further sub-regional divisions; for example, an area that includes parts of Georgia, South Carolina, and Florida is further divided into the Etowah, Savannah, and Lamar phases, each of which is associated with a particular ceramics assemblage. Dr. M explained that the Lamar phase (1375–1625 CE), for example, is generally associated with pottery of “three major types: complicated stamped, plain, and incised” characterized by a modified rim made with “an additional strip of clay added to the rim, which is then pinched, sculpted, or formed into nodes”. The Mississippian chronology is based on the ceramic assemblages that have been found, in much the same way as the earliest typologies put forth by Flinders Petrie in the late nineteenth century for Egyptian pottery and the seriation charts created for the southeastern United States specifically by James Ford in the 1930s. Now that they have been established, the periods and phases of the Mississippian eras provide an outline for the general dating of future ceramic finds. Though the focus of Dr. M’s ceramics class is not the dating of ceramic artifacts, but the classification of them by type, the temporal-regional divisions of the Mississippian period serve as a kind of scaffold on which form/function-based typologies can be built. The Mississippian timeline also serves as a backdrop for the other supplementary article assigned by Dr. M to accompany the form-and-function lessons, namely Hally (1986). Both of the additional readings deal specifically with the pottery of the Southeast and both make larger points about typologies, but for the purposes of the course, they also offer a workable set of categories for the classification of pottery and potsherds. In fact, a table from Hally (1986) was reproduced on a handout; the table included information about thirteen types of “Barnett phase vessel types”, including vessel type (e.g. “large pinched rim jar”), “orifice diameter range” (40–50 cm), “effective capacity range” (41.0–80.0 liters), and “frequency in rim sherd sample” (which, for the large pinched rim jar, is eight) (1986, p. 276). This particular table is presented in the article as a reference to how often particular pot shapes occur within the archaeological record; Hally explains that even though the results might be biased according to location (i.e. an excavation of a cooking area or structure could feasibly yield more cooking pots than another area), the numbers provided by the table represent “the best estimate

70 Teaching Classification available for the relative frequency with which different morphological types were used and broken” (1986, p. 276). The context of the table within article (as an indicator of relative frequency) differs from the decontextualized presentation of the same information (indeed, the same table) to the class in the form of a handout. From the class’s perspective the table provides frequencies but, more important, it also provides a diameter range and a capacity range for vessels from the Barnett phase of the Mississippian era. An Operationalized Typology Dr. M’s primary concern, given the sites at which she works, would be the determination of vessel function from pottery sherds, and her lectures emphasized the need to navigate the relationship between vessel use and composition. The broad categories (in terms of choices made by potters that could be aligned with specific uses) outlined by the course text include temper, form, thickness, hardness (resistance to stress), thermal behavior (how a form reacts to firing or subsequent exposure to heat), permeability (how well water and heat get in and out), and surface treatment (glazes can provide waterproofing) (Rice, 2005, pp. 224–239). This concern lends itself to a particular kind of classification schema based on these attributes. Dr. M gave students a packet of handouts that included ten different ceramic attribution forms that have been used by different archaeologists to record pottery and potsherd artifacts. These forms represent different researchers’ needs in terms of classification parameters. The packet included the following: • • • • • • • •

Two forms that prioritize surface treatment (including specific color-oncolor combinations for Rio Grande pottery) One form for recording minerals observed in thin-section One form that focuses on the measuring of sherdlet count and weight One form that provided options for a “rough sort type” One form that distinguished between measurements pertaining to “all sherds” versus “diagnostic sherds” One form that asks for the “type/variety” designation Two forms specifically for recording only rim sherd information One form specifically for the “Mississippi River Valley late prehistoric” site

Each of these classification systems was developed by a specific researcher (or research team) to deal with a specific set of ceramic artifacts. Dr. M also directed students to Rye’s (1981) Pottery Technology for the visual cues that indicate different firing atmospheres (p. 116) and to Rice (2005, p. 216) for basic designations based on diametric height ratios that are then associated with a basic shape: plate, dish, bowl, vase, or jar. Figure  3.1 is a photograph of my class notes (and the corresponding shapes copied from the board) from Dr. M’s lecture on how height-to-diameter ratio can be used to differentiate among these form labels.

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Figure 3.3 My class notes on basic shape designations

As my notes indicate, Dr. M was very clear about how, even if you have criteria, you cannot expect it to always match up to reality. One of the reasons for the mismatch between criteria and reality has to do with the natural variation that occurs within any kind of human behavior; the kind that arises from “activity-specific interaction and performance”, as mentioned by Schiffer and Skibo (1997, p. 45). Dr. M impressed upon her class the fact that there is room for the propagation of variety at every stage of pottery production. The additional fact that the worldviews of the potters themselves “may be different than yours” plays into a tangible application of the etic versus emic distinction, because, as Dr. M pointed out, “what might be a percentage difference to you might still be ‘two handfuls’ to them and might not be deemed different”. Nonetheless, statistical variances are used to sort out intended differences versus unintended ones. Quantitative Typology The primary question for any quantitative analysis is what to count? What do the numbers represent? For ceramics, a quantitative typology operates

72 Teaching Classification on a ‘one rimsherd equals one vessel’ assumption, which is parallel to the concept of minimum number of individuals (MNI) from paleontology where one right femur is taken to represent one person. For paleontology, this kind of calculation most likely results in the underestimation of individuals, but for ceramics the tendency would be toward overestimation. Dr. M mentioned this in her introduction to quantitative methods for ceramics classification, but then followed by saying that, even if this approach did result in a higher total number of vessels, “you’d still get the same typology”. In the end, she said, it boils down to talking about “ ‘170 vessels’ versus ‘170 rimsherds’ ”. During the discussion of the day’s readings, the following exchange occurred: If you’re consistently overshooting numbers of types, wouldn’t that mess up your stats? DR. M: Not if you’re consistent in overshooting. STUDENT:

Consistency, then, allows for statistical comparison. The class discussed the use of statistics and percentages of vessel type to draw conclusions about the function of a specific structure or site (“What would it mean if jars weren’t the main vessel type? What if the site was 73% bowls?”). Typology here is particularly important because the presence of vessels designated as ‘jars’ serves as an indication of a community-based lifestyle in which individual households aren’t storing their own food. Jars are for storage or cooking, whereas vessels designated as ‘bowls’ are understood to be for serving and/ or eating. If there are more jars, then the structure being excavated has some purpose related to storage. If there are more bowls, then the structure is for eating. Dr. M explained that “you can do the stats” to see if there’s a statistical difference between percentages of vessel types between structures that would in turn indicate a difference in the use of the structures. In this way, Dr. M was able to tie together artifacts and the behavior of the people who made and used the vessels: What if you had a whole site with storage vessels and no bowls? Then you’d ask, “Where did all the bowls go?” STUDENT: Maybe it was BYOB (.) bring your own bowl [laughter] DR. M: It could be that you had the feast here and then would go home with your bowl (.) colonists didn’t have many bowls (.) English at that time didn’t have many bowls (.) later on the economy changes and buying and selling a bunch of shit you don’t need becomes a thing and at this point you see the individual become more important than the community (.) so you take the percentages and then you can start to build bigger ideas from that (.) a percent is a way to understand lifeways. DR. M:

In tying the ceramic object to ‘lifeways’, Dr. M is demonstrating that, from the archaeologist’s viewpoint, the numbers represent something about

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human behavior. The application of quantitative typology in the American Southeast is dependent on the execution of a classification system for potsherds. And this, as Dr. M explains, is a practice that takes a lot of practice.

Practical Experience From sites like those worked by Dr. M, which are fourteenth-century Mississippian Indian sites (“pre-de Soto ruining everything”), what the archaeologist is dealing with is approximately 40,000 to 50,000 pottery sherds. Dr. M describes her experience approaching such a massive number of potsherds from a single dig site: “They’re small. You skip the smallest ones. The minimum number you examine is a couple hundred; the ideal number to examine is a couple thousand”. Although she acknowledges that, in application, the pottery characteristics that you look at in order to classify your sherds (e.g. color, surface decoration, temper) depends on what questions you’re trying to answer, the class assignments instruct students to use/identify/ measure a wide range of sherd characteristics. For these assignments, students were given seventy-five potsherds to classify and turn in reports for. The first such assignment asked them to identify temper in terms of primary, secondary, and tertiary materials; the size range of the materials; the roundness, shape, and density of the materials; and the hardness of the sherd. This initial assignment had students working with sherds that had already been typed and described, thus creating a situation where there was a ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ answer. Subsequent assignments gave students a chance to work with untyped sherds using the same categories as before and adding shape and production-related attributes (e.g. what kind of rim, decoration, etc.) to the list of characteristics to identify. These assignments provided students with worksheets to fill out for each sherd and included space to sketch the sherd “if the spirit moves you”. Dr. M pointed out that, when it comes to identifying sherd characteristics, a researcher’s skills improve with time. One of the graduate students confirmed this, advising her less-experienced classmates to “do the best you can knowing that you’ll get better as you go along and that your first few are less accurate”. The more sherds you look at, the better you get at identifying their features, which means that, to an extent, volume is key, which is why each student was assigned a large number of sherds for typing (to ensure that the “overall assessment is more reliable”). Dr. M also reassured students that “you don’t do this for 20,000 sherds; these [attributes] are tools to answer specific questions” emphasizing that not every investigation calls for the same information. In this way, all of the different ways that a potsherd can be described constitute the archaeologist’s “bag of tools”. Archaeologists are “taught to see” via “practice and guidance” (Dobres & Hoffman, 1999, p. 7). While we see how Dr. M’s assignments, which ask students to work with a large number of sherds, speak to the importance of ‘practice’ in an archaeologist’s classification training, the classroom context

74 Teaching Classification also offers a site for guidance. The following interactions illustrate how students are ‘taught to see’ in a classroom situation. a) STUDENT 1: Lip thickness DR. M: Yeah, it is. STUDENT 1: Seems kinda

is the same as rim thickness?

arbitrary where you measure the rim from (.) it varies DR. M: You’ll want to get an average then, b) STUDENT 2: This looks flattened on DR. M: This is definitely beveled.

top but still rounded? Is it rounded?

c) STUDENT 1: My guess is that this is a DR. M: [nods] STUDENT 1: [writes on

large bowl? paper]

Looking at it one way, much of the classifying of ceramic artifacts has to do with making discrete categories out of things that aren’t discrete. The practice of measuring entails using a number to describe the physical reality of an object. As the student in example a) finds out, sometimes what gets recorded on paper is not really a ‘measurement’, but generalization that happens to take numerical form (in this case, the number would represent an average of rim thickness measurements). Rather than being ‘arbitrary’, though, an average still represents an attribute in a way that is meaningful in describing or classifying the potsherd. Shanks and Tilley (1993) explain that the acquisition of knowledge can be seen as “a resolution of contradiction between knowledge, located subjectively, and the objective facts” (p. 47). Students are continually trying to pull together what they know subjectively and what they see in front of them, as in example b). You might have an idea of what “rounded”, “tapered”, and “beveled” mean, and you may well have diagrams copied from those that the teacher made on the board, and you may have held one example of each as they were passed around class, but these subjective experiences still need to be resolved in terms of how they apply to objects. Interaction b) is a snapshot of the process by which a student can form ‘knowledge’. What appears as a simple correction by the teacher is also an opportunity for the student to create for herself both an equivalence of the terms lip and rim and a definition of beveled as ‘flat on top but still rounded’. Ultimately, typing a sherd is a process, consisting of taking measurements and identifying attributes first and, then, using those measurements and identifications, “decid[ing] on a basic form label last”. In example c), one sees how a classification framed by the student as a “guess” can transition into ‘an answer’ with confirmation from the teacher.

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Follow-Up Interview I conducted a follow-up interview with Dr. M while she was working in her lab; I asked her to ‘think out loud’ and walk me through the classification of a pottery sherd from the artifact collection currently before her. Following is an excerpt from her classificatory description: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18

So the first thing I would do is take my glasses off [laughs] and look for my little scope [pause] I use a pretty gentle hand to do it and then I look in there and I mean the shell is obvious you don’t even need the scope to see the shell [pause] I see a lot of grog, so, this is a big piece of grog right there, that’s the refired pot or refired clay; there’s a smaller piece right there. The black pieces are likely burned shell. Now they could have been previously burned before they were added to the temper. Or they, they’re on the outside so maybe some got more burned, but it would be odd that this one is burned and that one right next to it is not. My guess is that they were previously burned before they were added to shell. More grog there [points with pencil tip], there, there, there. You know. It just looks like burned clay. And it might be limestone but it looks like some piece of rock. And then if you compare it to um the shell, the shell is what we call ‘platey’. It’s going to come off in sheets almost. But that [points with pencil tip] is more of a blocky kind of texture, um and that’s one way I identify it as grit. But I wouldn’t call it grit if I could only see one piece of grit basically, because then it could just be something thrown in there.

Dr. M’s description of this sherd outlines her process for interpreting visual cues when assessing an artifact for classification. The artifact that she showed me contained several kinds of temper: grog, which she defines as a “refired pot or refired clay” (line 5); burned shell, which she points out as “black pieces” (line 6) and describes as “platey” (line 14); and grit, which has a “blocky kind of texture” (line 16). Her assessment of the burned shell temper emerges through her interaction with the object as she wonders if the shell was burned before added to the clay (line 7) or was burned as the pot was used, which could be indicated by the burned shell was only on the outside of the pot (lines 8–9); however, because one piece of shell is burned and the one next to it is not, she concludes that the shell in this pot was “previously burned” (lines 9–10). The process we observe in Dr. M’s thinking out loud underscores the way that archaeologists (and people in general) make assessments about the things in front of them and then adjust those assessments as interaction with those things continues. This point may seem obvious, but the continual interactions that we have with the physical world result in assessments that are fluid and emergent, which in turn feed the classifications that follow. Clearly, the focus of Dr. M’s classification modus operandi is to start with temper. The potsherd in question has several kinds of temper added (shell,

76 Teaching Classification grog, and grit). For each kind of temper, Dr. M estimates density as a percentage, saying that “I always look at it and go down cause I know I tend to go up [. . .] I would say almost everything’s maybe 1% grit, 3% grog, and maybe like 4% shell”. About the temper particles, she also explains that she has her students make additional judgments about particle size and roundness “so they know how to do it, but I don’t really do it very much”. Here we see a difference between what she teaches her students to do and what she herself does in practice, but this difference makes sense, because budding archaeologists need to know how to do everything because they don’t know what they’ll need to do in the future. The underlying point is that the attributes that you record for each sherd need to ‘tell you something’ and attributes that don’t give you usable information are not recorded. This is where the ideas of interaction and emergence come into play, as the conditions, findings, and artifacts encountered at a site will influence what kinds of analysis you can do and which attributes are worth investigating in detail. Dr. M said that when she started, she recorded everything and then “ran some data” to find which attributes might provide answers to the research questions she was asking (e.g. did they change the way they made pottery over time?). Dr. M explained that, “what you record depends on what your question is. So you don’t want to spend a lot of time recording stuff that you don’t need”. She notes that there comes a point at which you have too much information such that you do a statistical analysis and “there’s no pattern, which is like, well, that’s useless”, because it is the presence of a pattern that suggests cultural meaning. In the interview, Dr. M reiterates what she told her class, that quantitative typologies that employ correlational statistics are still aimed at describing culture. In short, you are looking for numbers that indicate behavior; “you could try to say well maybe they were firing bowls a certain way or maybe they were firing ritual vessels a certain way” but if all of the sherds from one site are made of the same clay and the same temper then there’s no new information, which means that quantifying clay and temper is potentially a waste of valuable time. At the same time, sometimes a pattern appears later. Dr. M realized recently that there was a pattern to the shell pieces used as temper in the sherds from her site; “at first I thought this was just, you know, decay over time, that’s what I thought for years, but now I’m looking at them and I’m like, ‘yeah, I don’t think so.’ ” Her realization, that the people who made the pottery were using only the tiny, snipped-off bits of a spiral seashell as temper, revealed a pattern that fell outside of the measures and features included on an attribute list. Clearly this is an important realization in terms of understanding cultural behavior and it’s something that would need to be accounted for in a different way within her classification. Here Dr. M describes the process by which she physically sorts the sherds into groups: I sit there and sort them so I’ll have like twenty sherds or something, I break off each one, I look at each one’s temper (.) you know basically

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in my mind I use this all the time, shell and grog go here, shell and rock go there, shell grit and grog, shell, and then other (.) so I sort them into those piles by temper and then I pull out the form and I sort them by decoration, so it would be like shell and grog, cord marked, have any body or rim, or too small to tell, or do I have something that can be a handle, if I do then I note the other as well, and then this might be shell and grog also but plain. Dr. M’s operational typology is to divide the sherds into five groups according to temper, then by decoration, and then by how useful the sherd is in determining body shape and/or size (e.g. rim sherds are useful in this regard, but a lot of sherds are “too small” to indicate much about what kind of vessels they come from). The five temper divisions are: 1) shell and grog, 2) shell and rock, 3) shell and rock, 4) shell, grit, and grog, and 5) just shell. These groups are the ones that Dr. M expects to see based on her previous work at this site. Once the different tempers have been distinguished from one another, decoration and vessel size/shape are then considered. This is the typology that works for her and tells her what she needs to know about pottery production in order to address the issue of social inequality as it played out within chiefdoms located at the periphery of the Mississippian cultural region. Because she is working with sherds, Dr. M can use her physical experience with the artifact to make determinations about attributes that inform her classification. As she manipulated a large almost L-shaped sherd, she noted that it had a modification and pointed to the place where the piece had been “thickened or bolstered” but as she continued to handle the sherd, she changed her mind, “not really, in fact it feels smaller, you know, narrower there”. Her next observation was that the sherd was “not folded or pinched (.) I’m kind of at a loss (.) I’d almost call it an indeterminate”. An assessment of decoration took a similar, emergent route. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

There isn’t really, it’s real plain (.) and so. if it’s plain like that then I’m going to look for some kind of evidence that it’s been smoothed and so you could compare the inside versus the outside to see if it’s smoother [feels each side of the sherd with two fingers] not really [laughs] I mean it’s really kind of a crappy made thing, (.) and it almost looks like it wasn’t made as one thing (.) that this was added on to an existing body [holds sherd in profile] but if you look at in the profile, you don’t see that break there (.) you kind of see that it’s breaking apart a little bit here [points] um it looks less stable and also that it’s thicker (.) but I don’t [turning sherd in hands] what it was is probably they formed it out of one whole vessel and then maybe could have gone and made it thicker there [points].

The sherd was found at the Carter Robinson site in southwestern Virginia and is representative of utilitarian wares found there. And, really, the first

78 Teaching Classification designation that Dr. M is making about this sherd is that it is “plain” (line 1) and then that it has not been “smoothed” (lines 2–3), which would indicate that extra care was taken in the finishing of the piece. The bottom line of this classification is that this sherd is from a piece of “crappy” pottery, a kind of classification that Dr. M not only alludes to in her ‘think aloud’ interview (line 5), but also used in class as a way of referring to quickly and roughly formed pots that were likely made as utilitarian pieces. Dr. M points out how the structure of the sherd evidences the start of a “break” (lines 8–9), perhaps an indicator that part of the vessel had been added onto (lines 11–12), and it’s here at the point of talking about the possible production of this piece that her reference turns to what “they” might have done in forming the vessel it came from (line 11). Classification, both in this informal interview setting and in Dr. M’s writings on the Carter Robinson site, always comes back around to the behavior of the potters during the production stages of pottery-making.

Conclusion The experience of Dr. M’s course and of her interview comments points to the idea that classification systems emerge through use in answering specific research questions coupled with direct interaction with physical artifacts. The plethora of region-based typologies bemoaned by the SCIAA writers arose as American archaeologists who deal with ceramics have been driven toward creating distinctive classifications by the need to answer research questions that have become increasingly narrow and location-specific. Classifications emerge as they are created discursively through interactions among the researcher, the researcher’s training and background, the specific questions that the researcher is seeking to address, and the artifacts at hand (both as individual physical objects and as ‘data’ once the artifacts have been sorted into groups). As a practice, classification systems are created with the goal of becoming a link between artifacts in the present and social behaviors of the past. In terms of its application in the classroom—and in the field—a practice-based approach treats classification as an ongoing activity that is “located, interested, conflictual, [and] meaningful” (Lave, 1996, p. 7); practice-minded analyses focus on how knowledge is constructed and transformed during different types of interactions.

Note 1. Deptford is divided into Deptford Brushed, Deptford Check Stamped, Deptford Cord Marked, Deptford Incised, Deptford Simple Stamped, and Deptford Linear Check Stamped, which itself is divided into Deptford Linear Check Stamped/ Fabric Impressed, Linear Check Stamped/Cord Marked, and Linear Check Stamped/ Simple Stamped.

4

Classification in the Field Historical Archaeology

Introduction Goodwin (2010) describes cognition as “actual agent-object interaction” (p. 118), addressing the way that interaction unfolds on an archaeological site, particularly with the use of a Munsell color chart (see also Goodwin, 1994, 1995, 1997, 2000). This chapter looks at interactions focused on ceramic artifacts as they are assessed and classified in a historical archaeology setting. The site in question is a colonial one and, as such, one has access to historical documents with craftsmen-given names for ceramic vessel types as well as a history of archaeologists who have studied them, which means there is already an existing dialogue to which new identifications contribute. Any artifact uncovered is evaluated against a backdrop of categories and ideas that have previously been proposed, thus historical categories act as another part of agent-object interactions as they, too, inform the classification of objects that come out of the ground or are pulled off of the sieving-screen. This chapter examines data collected through participant observation of an archaeological excavation of the Rudolph Christ ([krɪst]) pottery kiln, which was in operation in Salem, North Carolina, from 1811 to 1829. I spent five weeks in the field, working as a volunteer under the supervision of a field director (FD) for whom the dig is part of his dissertation research. To say that the dig was a ‘learning experience’ seems a bit of an understatement. As Lucas (2001) explains, “excavation is a discovering practice, but not simply in the passive sense of a kind of revelation but in an active sense of materialization” (p. 42). Artifacts and features are physically uncovered, and it is in this way that archaeology “produces its own subject matter through a performance of presencing, of materializing its ‘data’ through excavation” (Lucas, 2001, p. 42). Because of my dual role as a volunteer participant and an observer with a research agenda, my ‘materializing’ of data occurred on two fronts: in the form of uncovering artifacts and taking measurements as part of the excavation team, and in the form of collecting ‘my’ data (handwritten notes, on-the-spot transcriptions of conversations, pictures, and brief recorded interviews).

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For ethnographic and for archaeological research, data collection can be contradictory in nature. Hodder (1997) illustrates the inherent contradiction of ‘objective’ data collection with an example from Joukowsky’s 1980 manual for field archaeology, which in one paragraph exhorts the student archaeologist to beware “subjective interpretation of the meaning of his or her excavation” and in the next paragraph explains that dirt “from a sterile layer [. . .] can be dumped, but if it comes from an occupation level, the earth should be carried to the screen, spread over it, and sifted so that no telltale signs will be overlooked” (qtd in Hodder, 1997, p. 691). Hodder points out that, though the first statement issues a caution against interpretation, the second statement argues that how one deals with dirt at a dig site depends on whether it comes from a layer interpreted as “sterile” or as “occupation” (p. 691). Decisions about what kind of layer is being excavated, whether an object is an artifact or something to be discarded, or even whether some piece of information or bit of conversation is worth writing down, all of these are based on an ongoing interpretation of the situations at hand. Deciding that something is ‘data’ is part of the larger classificatory process. Archaeological data come in many forms and are not limited to objects that come out of the ground, but also include other measurable criteria such as depths, soil color, and relative locations. Field procedure for this excavation entailed keeping a ‘unit record’ that could then be cross-referenced with a ‘stratum and level record’, with multiple places to record information about the unit, strata, layers, field samples, features, and artifacts. Tilley (1989) contends that, though they are full of presumably objective information, field records need to be “deconstructed because their combined effect is to deny the importance of the fundamental basis of all excavation: that it is autobiographic, subjective, socially determined and often fundamentally ambiguous and/or contradictory set of interpretive activities” (p. 278). All reports on excavations (including the present one) should be viewed as “socially mediated responses to traces of the past” (p. 278), a statement that seems equally applicable to linguistic research that involves a close reading of interview or other interactional data. Hodder explains that the way that an archaeologist approaches the excavation of a site depends a great deal on the “prior interpretation” of that site (1997, p. 692). For historical archaeology, that prior interpretation is further influenced by historical documents.

Historic Ceramics Without belaboring the point (and hopefully without bogging the reader down with detail), it’s worth taking a moment to talk about historic (i.e. post-Columbian or colonial) ceramics and the kinds of characteristics and attributes that are relevant to their classification. Historic ceramics are usually produced by ‘throwing’ a pot on a wheel and then firing the pot

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(often more than once) in a kiln. Classification issues pertaining to the potter’s wheel are mostly to do with the skill level of the potter. Relevant kiln factors have to do with the kiln shape and structure, the temperatures that a kiln can attain, and how the vessels being fired are arranged within. Historic ceramics also normally involve glazes (common glazes include lead glaze, tin glaze, alkaline glaze, and salt glaze) and a decent amount of decoration. Earthenware pieces (as opposed to stoneware or porcelain) make up the majority of what would be found in the Salem sites, and the different kinds of glazed earthenwares are often categorized as one of the following: •

• • • • • • •

Tin glazed—English and northern European delft pottery, French-inspired faience (which is the term used by Salem potters), or Mediterraneaninspired majolica, scattered production during the colonial period Staffordshire—early colonial wares derived from English forms and techniques, produced between 1675 and 1775 Yellow-ware—basic, utilitarian vessels such as chamber pots produced between 1825 and 1925 Jackfield—fine pottery with a glossy black glaze, a Staffordshire subtype, produced between 1740 and 1870 Creamware—thin and light with a cream-colored body, produced between 1750 and 1820 Pearlware—more white than cream, used mainly for tea and tableware, produced after 1779 (influence by English Wedgwood china) Whiteware—harder, more durable than creamware or pearlware, produced between 1820 and 1860 Ironstone—even harder than whiteware, produced between 1840 and 1885

Obviously, these terms reflect a ware-based conceptual model, and many descriptions present these types as an evolutionary chain of wares (cf. Brown 1982; Fisher, 1974; Hume, 1978) that form a gradual and overlapping series of wares/types that would be difficult to distinguish within ‘transition zones’. The notion of a ‘ceramics evolution’ seems tied to the idea that, over time, American ceramics became more fine—the clay has fewer inclusions, the vessels have thinner walls, the glazes became harder and show less crazing. My impression from the outside is that American potters were trying to increasingly imitate their English counterparts, who were in turn increasingly trying to imitate Asian ceramicists, and that all of the imitating was in response to consumer demand. Reality, as most archaeologists will attest, is not so neat as to affirm a step-by-step movement from one phase/type to the next. Even though there is already a ceramics typology present for American historical archaeology, few contemporary archaeologists would claim that this typology is perfect. But they use it because the

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traditional categories offer a convenient, shared vocabulary with which to talk about the artifacts at hand.

Historical Documents and Archaeology in Old Salem Old Salem is a “living history museum”, which is a restoration (and interpretation) of a colonial Moravian settlement. The Moravians traveled from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to the piedmont region of North Carolina, where they settled the Wachovia Tract and founded the towns of Bethabara (1753) and Salem (1766). The Moravians were fastidious recordkeepers, having a “teutonic penchant for record-keeping” (Bivens, 1972, p. 12), and the present-day Moravian Archives contains many historical documents, including letters, estate inventories, building plans, and minutes from the meetings of the community’s two governing bodies (the Elders Conference, which tended to the religious aspects of life, and the Aufseher Collegium, which looked after secular matters). Several different types of documents come to bear on the pottery of the Moravians of Salem and the kilns used to fire it; in fact, it was the 1821 map of Salem that led archaeologists to the location of the kilns associated with the community’s pottery workshops. Old Salem, Inc., was founded in 1950 as a means of preserving the historic Moravian district and has since grown into a popular tourist destination comprised of a series of museums, gardens, and ‘living history’ sites where costumed employees demonstrate various aspects of colonial life (e.g. cooking, silver-smithing, and pottery-making). The current president of Old Salem, Inc., emphasizes the interactive nature of the historic exhibits—to include archaeological sites—in order to foster public enthusiasm for and engagement with history. Thus, the excavation site was a kind of ‘exhibit’ as well, which meant that the volunteers were expected to interact with tourists, answering questions about the site (what we were looking for and what we had uncovered) and about excavation procedure. In addition, the head of Old Salem’s Department of Archaeology visited the site regularly to keep abreast of the dig progress and any new developments. Given the information found within the Moravian archives, the Christ site was expected to contain the remains of an 1811 pottery kiln. The walls of the kiln had been ‘pushed in’ when the kiln was decommissioned in 1829 and the top of a pile of oversized kiln bricks had been uncovered the summer before. The site was divided into 5-foot-square units, which were at different levels of excavation. The field director himself was excavating the builders’ trench beside the toppled kiln, trying to determine how far below street level the base of the kiln had been constructed. Volunteers were assigned additional units to work, spaced out in an attempt to determine the size (and possibly shape) of the original kiln structure. The Old Salem archaeologists had some expectations about what the Christ kiln might have looked like, given the shape of previously excavated Moravian kilns, but this structure appeared to be different from the other Moravian kilns. In

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addition, in one of the volunteer-excavated units were found the remains of an additional structure that looked to have been built behind (or onto the back of) the kiln. Over the course of the five weeks that I worked at the dig, ideas evolved and changed about what this unexpected structure could have been as additional information was uncovered. For example, vitrified bricks were found, which suggests that this other structure may also have been a kiln. For the archaeologist, the presence of relevant historical documents can be a guide and may set expectations, but interpretations of a site and its artifacts remain fluid, emerging through interactions with the physical objects that are uncovered. The field director explained, “I had an idea based on the other Old Salem kilns and the Bethabara kilns, but have had to adjust it as I go along”. Broadly conceived, another kind of ‘historical document’ can also create expectations: previous academic writing. Two books in particular, Bivens (1972) and South (1999), bore heavily on the expectations of what would be uncovered at the Christ kiln site. A rather interesting relationship exists between these two works. Bivens, a decorative arts scholar, based his book, The Moravian Potters in North Carolina, partly on the archaeological reports that South produced as he led excavations at Bethabara and Old Salem in the 1960s, and in doing so ‘pre-empted’ South’s own treatment of the archaeological data. Two decades later, South felt he could finally re-tell the same story from the perspective of an archaeologist and published Historical Archaeology in Wachovia. Though the books contain a lot of the same historical information about the Bethabara and Salem potters, Bivens’ book is more concerned with the decorative aspects of the pottery, whereas South’s interest lies in the functions and uses of the pots by colonial Moravians. Both books, however, set forth typologies for Moravian ceramic vessels. Bivens (1972) sets forth a ‘Wachovia typology’ with eleven categories, “determined both by existing specimens and by the terminology used by the potters in their own inventories” (p. 144). The potters’ inventories were written in German until 1818, after which they were kept in English. Bivens notes that both the language difference and the shift from one language to another probably affected the names for inventory items (as would our evaluation of the German inventory items now); “even the best translator cannot always correct for terminological ‘shift’ and changes in definition between one language and another” (Bivens, 1972, p. 114). Bivens also notes that the potters themselves were inconsistent as to what terms they used in the inventories: the term ‘pitcher’ is applied in the early 1800s to what had earlier been called a ‘jug’, the terms ‘plate’, ‘dish’, and ‘pan’ are used interchangeably, and what one potter called “decorated dishes”, another referred to as “flowered dishes” (1972, p. 114). According to Bivens, “the potters describe the things they made in terms of their own experiences and vocabulary; they had no idea of standardizing their ceramics language since they were not concerned about putting out a catalog” (p. 114). The task then is

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to match up existing vessels (or fragments of vessels) with the terms listed in the inventories. In attempting to do so, Bivens arrived at a set of eleven categories (p. 144): bottles jugs jars drinking vessels

bowls pans pots plates

lighting devices miscellaneous forms pressed ware

These categories are the basic categories that one still sees used on the placards at the Old Salem–affiliated museum. A little over twenty years later, Stanley South published his own account of archaeology in Wachovia. As an archaeologist, South maintains that, “the shape or ‘form’ of a vessel is determined by the function it serves” (1999, p. 213). South discusses ceramic wares (earthenware, stoneware, porcelain), noting that in Salem one finds mostly earthenware (red and white) with various kinds of slips and glazes. All told, South outlines seventeen different types that together represent “varying combinations of clays, glazes, and slips” (p. 217). This is how South defines ‘type’—by what particular combination is present. South also provides pictures and descriptions of sixteen Wachovia pottery forms: teapots tea cans milk pans pan milk jugs creamers

water jugs milk pots cook pots bowl pint cups plates

hand basins apothecary jars stove tiles pipes

In addition to these forms, the Wachovia potters also made candlesticks and holders, and a few types of kiln furniture (ceramic pieces used as supports or spacers during firing). South also mentions the importance of the Moravian inventories, stating that one inventory document in particular was a “Rosetta Stone” for him that lined up a signature mark with Rudolph Christ specifically (1999, p. 313). This points to one of the main questions for the Old Salem archaeologist, which is, who made what? The question is more complicated than simply lining up a potter’s mark with vessels of this type made into that form. The Salem potters’ shops were led by a ‘master potter’ who would have had at least one apprentice, may have had slaves, and on occasion, would have had input from journeymen. While South hints at the complexity of the relationship between who might have made the pots and actual pottery pieces and fragments in existence, this is an issue that has only gotten more complicated over time as new information has come to light and as new ways of addressing issues such as ethnicity, class, and power have

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entered the discipline. Attribution is complicated further by the fact that, despite being overseen by the church, the Salem potters were artists and businessmen who responded to market pressures. Rudolph Christ made his own version of so-called Queensware, which he referred to as “fine pottery” that was so much like its inspiration that, for one creamware teapot lid, South claims it was hard to tell if “Christ or a British potter” made it (1999, p. 343). Bivens and South were writing about pottery found as part of the archaeological work that South and others carried out between 1956 and 1975 in Lot 49 of Old Salem (the kiln and workshop of master potter Gottfried Aust). During the 1975 excavation, exploratory digging across the street uncovered what looked to be the entrance to another kiln. The opening was covered in plastic and then re-buried; this kiln was then rediscovered in 2007. Using minutes from meetings between the Aufseher Collegium and Christ, Hartley and Hartley (2007) detail the exchanges that took place that secured for Christ, upon his promotion to master potter at the death of Aust, the piece of property known as Lot 38 to use as the site for the “burning ovens, sheds, etc.” he would need to continue the business (Auf. Col., 17 May 1819, qtd. 2007, p. 29). A test excavation conducted in 2007 revealed what appeared to be the “east wall of the kiln opening” (2007, p. 45). At the time the kiln location was secured, there was a house (built in 1910) that stood on Lot 38 that has since been torn down. After the finding and re-finding of the Christ kiln and after Lot 38 had been cleared, a field director for the Christ kiln site was named and excavation began in earnest in the summer of 2016. The 2016 group, composed of volunteers and student interns, removed the top two layers of dirt from almost the entire excavation area, exposing the topmost layer of tumbled-down kiln bricks. A year later, I joined the 2017 summer excavation team.

Classification On-Site The data under discussion were collected via participant observation over the course of five weeks at the Christ kiln site (Figure 4.1). In addition to the field director (FD) and myself, there were a number of other volunteers, most of whom were students (undergraduate and graduate) and most of whom worked on the dig for a week. On the first day of the dig, while introducing us to the site and to the procedures we would be following, the FD gave us some background on historical archaeology, explaining that for American archaeology, ‘historical archaeology’ began amid a push for the preservation of historic sites (e.g. Jamestown, Roanoke, Mount Vernon). For American historical archaeologists, the focus since the 1960s has been on the dynamics of European expansion and colonialism. In terms of his research, specifically, the FD was working on a dissertation dealing with the way that changes in technology and operational chains affect the identities of individuals as potters and as Moravians. His interest in terms of the dig

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Figure 4.1 The dig site

site was the kiln layout and the layers of glaze drippings, to see if particular drips occur only in the middle of the kiln, or only at the sides of the kiln, which could help illuminate how a particular kind of pottery was understood and perhaps even an idea as to who stacked it. Assumptions and Questions in the Field The foundations underlying the excavation reflect the postprocessual leanings of the FD, who readily engaged the following assumptions and questions related to ‘knowing’ and interpreting the past:

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Assumptions • • • •

• •

“Functionalism is the F-word of anthropology” Everything is contested All spaces are culturally mediated You can’t look at culture without looking at language and history, but it is difficult to take in the whole picture at one time (“it’s always partial but you still get up in the morning and go to work”) Variations in pottery often have to do with the skill level of the potter Consumption and production are not different things; there are indications of consumption “through the producer’s eyes” because the potters react to market conditions

These assumptions derive from both a theoretical background and a specific historic background, one focused on the Moravians potters of Salem in the context of their community, their church, and their beliefs. As the first assumption suggests, the FD is among the many contemporary archaeologists who question functionalism in anthropology. Functionalism, as espoused by Malinowski and Durkheim in the 1930s, is the idea that all aspects of a culture are part of an interrelated, organic whole. Functionalism is not the same thing as processualism, though the two perspectives share the aim of objectively “identify[ing] relationships between variables in cultural systems” (Hodder, 1995, p.  82). A theoretical background that engages postprocessual concerns such as the interpretation and mediation of history and its artifacts serves as the foundation for the following questions with which the FD approached the excavation: Questions • • •

•

• • •

What does the excavation of this specific kiln add to an understanding of the social and economic forces present in historic Salem? How do present findings enter into a dialogue with past findings? With the historical records? How can variation in pottery decoration be explained/described? How much variation in pottery is allowed, that is, when is a piece “too different” to enter into the colonial market as a Salem piece? Is there a statistically significant difference between measurements of the peaks and valleys on decorated plates? And, if there is a significant difference, does that statistical significance signal some kind of social significance? About types: What is meaningful and what are we superimposing? How does the micro-history of the Christ kiln support (or undermine) the bigger narrative of the Moravians in Old Salem? What are the contingency of options at every stage of the chaîne opératoire?

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These questions reflect an expectation of dialogue with the past (both the historical past and the academic past). The FD explained how this works, saying that “you have to bounce back and forth between what you find and what you can write on in terms of dissertation or research topics”; I would argue that the same “back and forth” applies to all academic endeavors in which hypothetical deduction gives way to emergence. From this viewpoint, subjectivity grows out of direct material engagement with the world. Classification in the Field Classification, like interpretation, begins at “trowel’s edge” (Hodder, 1997, p. 693). Decision-making starts as objects are uncovered by schnitting (the FD, like his mentor, prefers to use the German term), scraping up dirt at a forty-five degree angle and then scooping it into a bucket used to carry it to the sieving screen. Encountering resistance to the trowel’s movement meant deciding whether the impediment was a rock, brick, root, or an object of interest. Objects of interest aren’t necessarily going to be deemed an ‘artifact’ in the strict sense; for example, the broken remains of what appeared to be a single Coke bottle plagued us for two entire layers of excavation. In addition to ceramic sherds, we found a lot of nails and other metal pieces, as well as older (non–Coke bottle) glass shards. Anything that caught your eye and was pulled directly from the ground was placed into a labeled artifact bag. Rocks, bricks, sticks, and roots went into the bucket with the dirt, to be removed during the next step of the process. After a bucket is filled, the decision-making continued at the screen (quarter-inch stiff wire mesh set in a wooden frame), which is set on wheels that can be pulled back and forth across a metal frame to ‘sift’ out dirt and leave larger items on the screen. At this point, you determine whether to keep an object and place it in the artifact bag or toss it into a wheelbarrow to be added to the dirt pile behind the site. There would be a lot of bricks and brick pieces, especially in the upper strata, but since there is only so much ‘data’ that can be gleaned from brick and since the bricks take up a lot of room, we didn’t keep them all. The FD instructed us to keep bricks that appeared vitrified, or that had glaze-drips and, if there were questionable items, we were told to put them off to the side for later judgment. The FD told us that we would “develop an eye for what’s an artifact and what’s not”; adding that one develops “a feel and an ear for it” because glass, rock, and clumps of clay all sound different as they roll across the screen. The FD noted that during a dig, layers of soil even smell different as they are being excavated; therefore, one should take a holistic approach that employs all of the senses as well as the intuition that develops with experience. The main ceramic distinction being made at this site was between pieces of ceramic kiln furniture and pottery ‘wasters’. Waster is the word used by archaeologists (and potters) for pottery that breaks during firing or, for whatever reason, pottery that is broken on purpose because it is judged ‘unacceptable’ for sale. And so, the ultimate discovery during the dig would

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have been the waster dump; sherds from a waster pile would show what types of pottery were being made, a relative time period for types, some indication of failure rates, an idea of what the potters were trying—yet not succeeding—to make (an “archaeology of failure”), etc. Comparing the sherds from a dump with the potters’ inventories could also help the archaeologist infer the degree of mastery of a potter (or apprentice). The Old Salem kilns were also teaching spaces, with the master potter taking on a series of apprentices. Though you can’t necessarily tell why a vessel ended up in the waster dump, if you find a sherd with beautiful decoration then you know that’s not why it was discarded. Waster piles would give a clue as to how much variation was allowed (i.e. what kinds of mistakes make it into the dump?). In my time at the dig, we didn’t find Christ’s waster dump, though we did spend a lot of time speculating as to where it might be.

Artifacts, Interactions, and Classification The first potsherd I found was deemed “hotelware” by the FD, a play on ware/type classification, used for common, inexpensive porcelain from more modern eras of mass production. As the digging progressed, more interesting potsherds were uncovered, many from the 1800s. The major distinctions that needed to be made about the seventeenth-century finds were: whether the sherd represented a Salem-made vessel or whether it was imported (the two main options: imports from elsewhere in North Carolina, such as Alamance Country, which had its own distinctive pottery, and imports from abroad); and, if the potsherd appeared to be local, if it was the remnant of a waster or of kiln furniture. Shanks (1998) views artifacts as social agents and looks at “the construction of our objects of archaeological interest through discourse” (p. 15), and this was evident from the dig-side interactions that took place whenever something interesting was found. In fact, the determination that a find was indeed ‘interesting’ marks the start of the classification process. After a day or so, the uncovering of brick pieces, nails, and glass became, perhaps not commonplace, but fairly routine. Because the site was intended to uncover the remains of a kiln specifically, the focus of conversation was usually on the pottery sherds that were found. At the outset of the dig, the FD did most of the on-site classifying, but as the weeks progressed (largely because of the encouragement and teacherly attitude of the FD), the students and volunteers would come up with a (tentative) classification for potsherds found. Jackfield Saga As mentioned already, one particular kind of early American fineware, modeled after British pottery, is jackfield pottery, which is thin-walled with a hard, glossy black lead glaze. Jackfield (also called ‘jackfield-type’, ‘jackware’, or sometimes even ‘blackware’) is uncommon among Salem pottery. South’s excavation of the Aust kiln (which was built on Lot 48, across the

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street from Lot 38) uncovered a piece of black-glazed pottery and the Moravian Archives does contain a potter’s recipe for “black glazing” (qtd. South, 1999, p. 324), so when the FD uncovered a glossy, black sherd (Figure 4.2) near the toppled 1811 kiln, he was excited. He called everyone over to show us the sherd, passing it around so everyone could get a good look at it, and explaining why this was a finding of significance: FD:

[turning the sherd over in his hand] jackware, black with high sheen (.) red on the inside (.) but this sherd is black on the inside too (.) we’ll have to compare this to Stan Smith’s find across the street of what he called ‘jackware-like’ or ‘jackware-inspired’ pieces (.) it was found in what seemed like floor stones (.) the sherd was close to those stones.

This particular finding—and the interaction that surrounded it—served as a touchstone for a number of future classification-based conversations. In the same way that Smith’s jackware-like find created a context for the classification of this sherd, this sherd added to the context against which future finds would be evaluated. Weeks later, another potsherd with dark glaze was uncovered, this time by one of the student volunteers. Knowing that we were on the lookout for

Figure 4.2 Suspected jackware sherd

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sherds with dark, glossy glaze, the student climbed out of the pit he was excavating and took the sherd over to the FD: STUDENT: look at this [holds out sherd to FD] FD: [takes it, examines it, looks back at student]

ooh, you’re my new best friend (.) huh (.) that looks like (.) that is thick (.) ah, hmm, it’s gotta be the interior of a vessel (.) his is like jackfield (.) kinda (.) we had another piece that kinda looks like jackfield. Stanley thought he found some pieces (.) they were trying to do like jackfield (.) jackfield has a red interior and jet-black shiny exterior (.) other day’s piece had a dark gray interior (.) it busted where the wall was trying to come up from the base (.) [turning the sherd] look at how thick in profile this is (.) thicker than some slips (.) probably adding ferrous to glaze [puts it in a small white bag] (.) maybe cooler than faience cause we know from historical documents that they knew how to do faience, we have recipes and everything, but only hints about jackfield because of the archaeology across the street and there weren’t a whole lot of pieces (.) also jackfield is associated with a specific type of British pottery (.) the example we have in the lab is glazed on both sides (.) this is only glazed on the interior (.) [holds up white bag] PowerPoint slide–worthy right there

What we see here is an example of the FD’s teaching technique of ‘thinking out loud’, in which the excavation participants are walked through the identification and classification process of an expert. In this case, the FD starts with the glaze, its thickness, and the fact that it was the interior of the vessel that was glazed. The potsherd appears, like its predecessor, to be jackfield-like. Unlike the other sherd, which had a gray interior, this sherd has a red interior, which along with the shiny black glaze suggests jackfield. What made this artifact so interesting and “maybe cooler than faience” is the fact that while a recipe for a tin-based glaze was found in the archives, mention of jackfield specifically (which would have been a possibility, given the presence of jackfield pottery in England at the same time) was not found. The piece was deemed noteworthy enough to be placed in a small white bag that was labeled with the date and unit number and placed inside the larger unit bag and to be labeled aloud as “PowerPoint slide–worthy”. The FD’s final comment on the jackware issue was that “it keeps getting more complex”. Fluid, Flexible, and (Sometimes) for Fun Archaeologist Ian Hodder (1997) famously wrote that classifications are “momentary, fluid, and flexible” (p. 691), and we see this illustrated by exchanges between the FD, myself (AB), and a student volunteer after the

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student hands the FD a newly uncovered pottery sherd that has dark glaze with a darker streak running through it: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22

Student: [hands sherd to FD] is that a drip of glaze? FD: [turns sherd over in hand] goes from translucent to (.) seems overfired (.) maybe from a reducing atmosphere but I don’t know what lead glaze would look like in a reducing atmosphere (.) black glaze, turn the pot over it and let it smudge a bit AB: if it is overfired, would you be able to tell from the middle? FD: yeah we’re not seeing what you’d expect for overfired, maybe they’re trying to do something with a black-brown, but maybe they’re trying to do something like you’d see in Alamance where there’s what they call a black-brown (.) couple of possibilities, have to think it over to figure out which one is most likely [slants in light—sherd has translucent sheen] got a high sheen (.) now this is interesting (.) AB: you think it’s a pattern? FD: if it was trailed slip, I would expect more of the slip to remain, so I don’t know (.) looks too perfect (.) I would expect some additional trailing, like a shadow, like intaglio, cause I’ve seen trailed slipware come out of here with more tracking (.) it’s just on the interior (.) maybe they tried to do a black background especially if they wanted to compete in the market, but how much competition could a family operation be to an industrial complex like this one? (.) just takes one customer coming and asking for it (.) they were artists, listening to a variety of voices, maybe some ego (.) it’s a dialectic.

Note how the classification of the sherd changes as the FD looks at it more closely and the identification of specific attributes having to do with the firing process changes, moving from “overfired” to “reducing atmosphere” (line 3) as does his assessment of the decoration. The glaze is described as shifting from “translucent” (line 2) to a darker color, the name for which itself shifts from “black” (line 4) to “black-brown” (lines 8 and 10) to a “black background” (line 18). Naming the glaze color “black-brown” coincides with the mention of pottery made in Alamance County, where the potters referred to one of their glazes with that term. In addition, the FD’s determination of the sherd’s finish is referred to as “glaze” (line 5); the application of the term “trailed slip” (line 14) is questioned as he evaluates what he see with what he would expect: the slip is “too perfect” (line 15) versus appearing “like a shadow, like intaglio” (line 16). All of this is then connected with the larger social context of North Carolina pottery and the “family operation” of Alamance County in possible competition with the Salem potters’ “industrial complex” (lines 19–20). It’s worth noting that the FD said later, about examining the same sherd more closely in the lab, “I’ll hit it with a P-XRF and see what’s going on and then I can recognize it visually.” The term “dialectic” (line 22), then, applies not only to historical relationship between

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the potter and his customers, but also to the classification of the glaze on the sherd in that the FD is explaining that knowing the components of the glaze via P-XRF (e.g. lead, manganese) would assist in the future identification of that kind of glaze. At times, classifying potsherds became almost a game, as the youngest student volunteer would bring a newly found sherd to me to see if I could figure out what it was before presenting it to the FD for the ‘right’ answer. Sometimes my assessment was deemed correct and sometimes the FD would guide me to a better or more specific classification. Sometimes the FD himself would present me with a sherd to type: FD: AB: FD: AB: FD: AB: FD:

[hands sherd to AB] What is it? [taking sherd, turning it over] pearlware or creamware because of the puddling what color is the puddling? [turns sherd over] blue so? it’s pearlware (.) [FD nods] handpainted? transferware [takes sherd back, pointing] look how small and detailed the pattern is (.) too fine for hand-painted.

What is not obvious from the foregoing exchange is that it was because the glaze on the sherd had a red clay interior and a white background that I made the initial judgment that it had to be either pearlware or creamware. After the initial suggestion of “pearlware” was confirmed, I took the next step and tried to say something about the type of decoration, which the FD corrected with explanation. The FD was adept at using both details and analogies to explain why he would make the classifications that he made. Whiteware is similar to pearlware, but lacks the blue pooling in the indentations; however, if a whiteware sherd has blue decoration, it can be difficult to distinguish between the two because “so much blue print [makes] that white part looks bluish”. Unlike creamware, pearlware, or whiteware, porcelain is white all the way through (i.e. it is made from white clay instead of red clay), though it too could be difficult to distinguish from the surface alone, which will often look “white like skim milk, kinda blue”. The FD made it clear that accepting without question the idea that creamware evolved into pearlware, which evolved into whiteware, etc., is “imposing a linear evolution onto ceramics”, which is fine in terms of understanding a general trend as long as one understands that this ‘evolutionary system’ is less of an exceptionless rule and more of a flexible guideline. When a large pottery sherd with dark glaze dripped onto it is found by one of the student volunteers, the FD’s classification of the object emerges as he turns the piece over and over in his hands: FD:

interesting (.) it’s certainly wheel-thrown, you can see the cut from the string after they stopped the wheel (.) [makes sweeping gesture and

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The rest of the fieldworkers aren’t speaking, so the FD appeared as if he were in conversation with the potsherd itself, though he used descriptive words such as “funky”, “fugly”, and “wonky” that are definitely attuned to his silent (human) audience. Shanks (1998) states that “only humans talk, and when artifacts are said to speak it is through a human intermediary” (p. 21). Shanks is referring to the idea that objects can speak (figuratively), and the idea that artifacts have something to tell us informs our interactions with them. In the foregoing interaction, between the FD and the unusually proportioned potsherd, there are a number of factors (the unevenness of the vessel walls, the ‘wonky’ comb marks, and general ‘coarse’ nature of the pot) that suggested to the FD that this could have been the work of an apprentice. The classification that emerged from his interaction with the physical artifact was, in a word, amateur. The idea that artifacts speak can also take a lighter turn. Toward the end of the dig, the FD was joking around and ended up explicitly evoking this very sentiment: FD:

FD:

[holds sherd to ear] is that a setting tile fired to stoneware consistency with a salt glaze I hear? [everyone laughs] see it does have an orange peel texture, takes on a sheen and this thing’s been fired at a high temperature, perhaps multiple times (.) it’s more coarse (.) [knocks sherd against side of metal wheelbarrow] hear that? not as tinny as stone (.) compared to that other one from earlier, instead of orange peel with dimpling where you could really feel the salt granules, not fired enough to really vitrify (.) could use as a pumice (.) [more laughter] it’s so Friday.

Yes, the archaeologist must listen to what the artifact tells him/her about what it is, who might have interacted with it in the past, how it will be conceptualized and categorized in the present, but listening is not easy; “there is no simple answer to the issue of language, agent and object” (Shanks, 1998, p. 21). This is where the discursive object can be plainly seen. Other classifications, rather than being ‘formal’ academic type names that rise to the surface as labels proffered in a specific situation, were created on the spot. One small sherd that I found that was whiteware with a brown band across the top (Figure 4.3), which the FD described as “not porcelain but still fineware—definitely pinky up”. We then used the term “pinky up” in reference to two additional pieces of the same cup that were uncovered

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Figure 4.3 ‘Pinky-up’ ware

later. Like a lot of the inside jokes that developed over the course of the excavation, the classification of a sherd as ‘pinky-up ware’ grew out of interactions with artifacts at a specific time, in a specific place, and among a specific group of people. Emergent classification produces one-offs, jokes, and light-hearted labels, not just new applications of academic ones. Shanks (1998) explains that artifacts as social agents are implicated in the “construction of our objects of archaeological interest through discourse” (p. 15). Artifacts are thus viewed as engaged in the discourse that surrounds them, and I would argue that Shanks’ assertion applies as well to historical archaeology as it does to the prehistoric. But in historical archaeology, documentary evidence is also agentive in that it influences how one interprets artifacts, just as the artifacts that are uncovered affect in turn the interpretation of historical documents and the documents and artifacts taken together are then used to construct a schema of the past.

Follow-Up Interview To some of the volunteers, our excavation lunch breaks probably felt more like being in a classroom than being at a picnic table, as the FD and I would talk about topics such as Moravian history and archaeological theory.

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During many of these lunchtime lessons, I took notes as the FD explained things such as the difference between pearlware and creamware, Tim Ingold’s concept of the “task-scape”, and the Moravian belief in pietism. Once, as lunch was winding to a close, the FD stood and jokingly remarked, “Here endeth the lesson”. The undergraduate student volunteers would sit patiently and listen, occasionally asking questions or making remarks about artifacts we had found. During one of these lunch breaks, the FD was kind enough to allow me to record a ‘think aloud’ session as I laid out a handful of potsherds (see Figure 4.4), three of which he had already seen as they were uncovered at the site, and two additional sherds that I had set aside during the morning so that I could get his spontaneous reaction over lunch. The following interview excerpt includes the FD’s assessment of Sherd 1 featured in Figure 4.4, which was a slightly curvilinear piece with bits of cream-ish and green glaze and a red clay interior: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

AB: is that at trivet? is that kiln furniture? FD: [turning sherd in hands]: Nope, huhuh so this is, you’ve got two rounded sides [runs fingers along curve] it’s curved, this is a handle (.) now what’s really cool about this and I’m glad you didn’t show me earlier ’cause this is really cool (.) this looks to me, based on the glaze, this looks a lot like tortoise shell which is creamware (.) it’s a cream color and it has splotches of copper oxide and we know that Christ and the other potters were taught how to make tortoise shell by William Ellis who was the Staffordshire potter who came up from Bartlam’s experiment in South Carolina and tortoise shell is one of these glazes that Rudolph Christ becomes known for (.) but again it would have been Christ and the apprentices and the journeymen and the workmen who were working (.) they all had a hand in making this (.) it’s not just the master potter but yeah that’s really cool and its pretty big, quite the— AB: yeah if it is the handle of something, it would be pretty big (.) I think there’s another piece of it too— FD: yeah, everyone once in a while we find some of this and again based on how much glaze is left it’s hard to say if this is a waster or if it’s been subjected to a bunch of churning and beating it up after it was deposited, but it’s possible that it’s a waster (.) hmm, that’s pretty cool.

The FD moves from commenting on shape (lines 2–3) to a detailed examination of the glaze, describing it as “tortoise shell”, which is a kind of creamware (line 6). The FD then characterizes the appearance of tortoise shell glaze as cream with “splotches of copper oxide” (line 6–7); the FD likely knows the splotches are copper oxide because glaze recipes can be found amid the historical documents housed in the Moravian Archives. Immediately following the statement about the glaze ingredient, the FD uses the phrase ‘we know’ in conjunction with Christ and what he was

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Figure 4.4 Sherds for classification

reported to have learned from the English potter William Ellis (lines 7–10), to which he adds that it is the tortoise shell pieces that “Christ becomes known for” (line 11). The FD then adds information that I know reflects his own research, which concerns the pottery-making industry as a whole: apprentices, journeymen, and workmen as well as the master potter (lines 12–14). Within the context of historical archaeology, it seems difficult to unhook an artifact from the documents that inform its discovery. Artifacts are evaluated against this context, and, in this way, context feeds classification.

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The FD’s attention returned to the sherd and an examination of the condition of the glaze, about which he stated that it is “hard to say” whether the patchy condition of the glaze was from something that happened during production (which would make it a waster) or something that happened to the vessel during use or after it was discarded (lines 18–21). The FD moved immediately to the next sherd, Sherd 2, which is also pictured in Figure 4.4. The FD picked up Sherd 2 and turned it over in his hands, continuing to do so as he talked about how he would classify it: 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

FD: yeah I think that based on the thickness and based on the exterior, and then it’s so hard, it looks like it’s been subjected to repeated firings, um and this is consistent with (.) and also the diameter for the rim, this is consistent with a side and a rim sherd from a sagger bowl (.) it has almost a stoneware hardness AB: that would’ve been a pretty big bowl wouldn’t it? FD: yeah but you have to remember that these sagger bowls have to be big enough that you could load them with pipes or you can put whole vessels inside to protect the vessel. I always imagine a ceramic hatbox, that’s what I think of when I think of what a complete sagger would look like. AB: and that makes sense then why it’s not glazed or decorated FD: uh huh, it’s just been repeatedly fired to a stoneware-like hardness.

A sagger bowl is a large ceramic vessel used to hold smaller vessels in place (and safe) during the kiln-firing process.1 Sagger bowls are utilitarian pieces, intended to hold up through repeated firings, which means they are thickwalled vessels that would not have been decorated. The FD noted the sherd’s thickness, its (undecorated) exterior, and the fact that the sherd is very hard as a result of “repeated firings”, all of which point to the piece being from a sagger bowl (lines 22–25). Being classified as a sagger also means that the sherd won’t be classified as stoneware, instead the FD referred to it as having “almost a stoneware hardness” (line 26) and a “stoneware-like hardness” (line 34). Estimated vessel size is another characteristic that supports the classification of the sherd as a sagger piece. After the FD mentions rim diameter (line 24), I follow a moment later with a comment (with tag question) about the vessel having been a “pretty big bowl” (line 27), to which the FD responds with a description of the sagger bowl’s purpose (lines 28–30) and his own mental image of a sagger as a “ceramic hatbox” (line 30). Given the fact that one doesn’t often find a whole sagger (given the purpose of a vessel, damage is unavoidable), the FD’s description is particularly pertinent. The conversation about this sherd ends with me clarifying that the sagger’s function is what would necessitate its lack of glaze or other decoration, which the FD followed with the reiteration of his belief that the piece had been “repeatedly fired”. Again, though, it is historical evidence that informs

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classification. Instead of having to guess/deduce the production processes of pottery-making (as you might with prehistoric ceramics), there is a historical context in place for this dig that allows the FD to connect attributes (lack of surface finish, hardness, thickness) to a type of vessel and its function and a set of other vessel types that this sherd can be judged against (i.e. this sherd is stoneware-like but is not, in fact, stoneware).

Conclusion Historical archaeologists Beaudry, Cook, and Mrozowski (1996) explain that excavated objects “can be viewed as a part of the hegemonic discourse that has much to tell us that is not illuminated by the documentary record, as well as much that is” (pp. 293–294). The artifact uncovered at a historical site “adds a texture, a reality, to the surfaces of the past that are revealed in print” (p. 294) and adds to the stories that historical documents outline. The artifacts that Beaudry et al. describe were better understood when contextualized within a documentary record; the co-analysis of historical texts helped “reconstruct meaning in the ‘active voice’, in the multiple voices of the ‘silent majority’ whose past discourse through artifacts reveals they were not so inarticulate after all” (1996, p.  294). For them, the material was able to give voice to those who were silent in terms of the historical documents; this seems also to be the case with the Old Salem excavation, as the aim of the FD is to listen for the multitude of voices present in the material remains of the kiln that are not heard from as much (or at all) in the archival texts. Hodder (1997) speaks of the circular relationship of categories, context, and interpretation, explaining that the goal of archaeology is to simultaneously evaluate artifact categories “against context information” while also evaluating context information against artifact categories (p.  696). Interactions that occur at the excavation site are situated within the historical record, they are informed by other identifications, they in turn inform future interactions, and they ultimately contribute to the emergence of the sitenarrative as a whole. In the end, we find that the classification practices and processes that occur at the archaeological excavation site are interactive and fluid, and anchored by the physical artifacts uncovered.

Note 1. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the term sagger “seems to be a corruption [of safeguard] due to etymological association with German schragen to prop up; perhaps it may have been invented by the German workmen employed in the Staffordshire potteries”. The fact that the Moravian potters kept their records in German until 1824 suggests a closer relationship between the term and its German familiar.

5

Classification Down the Scope Thin-Section Petrography

Introduction Thin-section petrography (TSP) was developed for geological study and has, since the 1970s, been applied to archaeological material to “characterize and interpret many inorganic materials used in the production of cultural objects or structures” (Reedy, 2008, p. 1). Dr. M, in her course on ceramics classification, briefly addressed the ‘lost art’ of petrography, referring specifically to the point-counting method from geological mineralogy that had been grafted onto archaeological thin-sections in the 1970s. Point counting is painstaking work and necessitates a special ‘stepping platform’ that moves the thin-section slide a little at a time so that one can count what inclusions/ voids are present at regular increments. As it turns out, though, the point count method is used less frequently than the so-called visual method practiced in the U.K. Thin-section petrography (TSP) is a “form of compositional analysis that is concerned with the characterization and interpretation of ancient ceramic artefacts in ‘thin section’ under the microscope” (Quinn, 2013, p. 4). TSP is primarily useful in determining the provenance of and technologies involved in the production of ceramics. But, to get to this ‘end point’ of connecting artifacts to behaviors, one must be familiar with geology and the optical properties of minerals and rocks. In a way, though it does seem very ‘scientific’, there seems to be something kind of romantic about petrography given the ‘lost art’ aura and the fact that what one sees under the microscope appears almost otherworldly at times. Michael Shanks plays to the ‘pretty’ aspect of petrography as he discusses the fact that different methods lead to different interpretations of archaeological artifacts: We can never capture raw materiality. Why should we? The object always withholds something. I put a thin section of the ceramic beneath my polarising microscope and it becomes another world of colours and patterns which technical skills can interpret as mineral inclusions and effects of temperatures. And even specifying chemical and physical composition is understanding as. (Shanks, 1998, p. 26)

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Different methods result in different ways of understanding physical reality, which is part of what Shanks implies by the suggestion that a method (any method) offers the researcher understanding as. The typologist working with prehistoric artifacts understands her pottery sherds as indicators of social integration and the development of a social identity, while the historic archaeologist understands his waster sherds as evidence of the relationship between technology, social stratification, and religious institution. Both viewpoints connect artifacts with behavior, and that is what petrographical study works toward as well, using optical mineralogy to connect what one can see in thin-section to where prehistoric peoples found their raw material source and what technologies were employed to make ceramic vessels.

Backdrop: The Intensive Short Course In the spring of 2017, I was both participant and observer of an intensive short course on ceramic thin-section petrography taught by Prof. Q, the purpose of which was to teach students how to “characterize and classify down the microscope”. Petrography can be applied to archaeological material to aid in the interpretation of artifacts; the goal of the course was to show students one way in which scientific data can be used to address aspects of past societies. The class was made up of only nine students who hailed from eight different countries and who represented a wide variety of backgrounds and motivations for taking the course. The academic interests of the students ranged from museum studies to geology to archaeology; some of us were already professors, while others were current dissertation writers. As a group (professor included), we really hit it off, which created a classroom atmosphere that was both friendly and lively. On the first day of the course, Prof. Q made clear that thin-section petrography is an interpretive endeavor, but that makes it no less valuable; “sometimes you have to take a leap into interpretation from the data”. Prof. Q contextualized the study of thin sections within the broader arena of archaeological ceramic study as follows: • • • • •

From the actual pot, one classifies the vessel by shape, size, decoration From a potsherd, you can gather information about the vessel’s decoration, fabric, and firing From a thin section, you cannot get information about shape, size, etc., but you can learn a lot about the composition of the body of the pot From powder, you get nothing but chemistry From multivariate statistics, pots are reduced to a dot on a bivariate chart

This contextualization provides a foundation for the class’s journey into TSP and demonstrates Prof. Q’s preference for TSP over other archaeochemical methods (i.e. the final two points reference INAA, for which artifacts

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have to be ground into a powder for analysis and whose results are analyzed via multivariate statistics, which are used to create groups that are then labeled as ‘types’). Getting from a ceramic artifact to its classification using TSP entails a number of steps, beginning with the preparation of the thinsection slide (which itself comprises a number of steps) and ending with a visual assessment of a sample under a microscope. The vocabulary of TSP is tied to a series of classifications within classifications (of minerals, of rocks, of fabric types) that build upon one another, and the petrography course’s ‘bottom-up’ approach mirrored that structure. Tools for Petrography The petrographical process begins with the preparation of thin-section slides. As part of our afternoon practicals, Prof. Q demonstrated the process of creating a thin-section slide, using about a half dozen different sherds as examples. First, a slice was sheared from each sherd with a diamond-blade saw. The slices were then mounted on prepared slides using a special epoxy and left to cure overnight (Figure 5.1, left). The next step is to grind what’s attached to the slide down to a thin sheet, first using an electric grinder/ buffer (Figure 5.1, right) and then finishing by hand until only the thinnest layer of the artifact is left. Once slides have been prepared, the primary physical tool for TSP is a geological microscope (Figure 5.2), which has two light-polarizing filters beneath the stage, one that allows only light waves that vibrate parallel to the filter to pass (called ‘plane polarized light’, or PPL) and one that adds an additional filter at a right angle from the first (‘cross polar light’, or XP).

Figure 5.1 Thin-section slide preparation

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Figure 5.2 Light-polarizing microscope

The analyzer lever on the microscope allows one to move between PPL and XP to look at different aspects of the slides. As Prof. Q explained, using PPL and XP allows you to “look at how the ordinary and extraordinary interact”. When you assess the optical properties of what’s on the slide, you get different information from PPL and XP; the shapes that you see are the same, but PPL looks more ‘black and white’ whereas the interference colors that are revealed in XP can be very bright and quite pretty.

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Assumptions and Questions The following assumptions and questions that underpin ceramic petrography largely have to do with the contributions that thin-section petrography can make to archaeological research: Assumptions •

• •

•

Petrography provides two kinds of information: provenance (locations, movement, migration) and technology (how people made pots in the past) Pottery moves (as a container or as a tradable item in itself) If you’ve got metamorphic rock in your pot, the pot came from a place with metamorphic rocks (because bulky raw material isn’t transported across long distances) The criteria of abundance: More pots of one type in one location indicates that that location is close to the source of those pots

These assumptions point to the application of petrography to issues surrounding the movement of prehistoric peoples. Important for understanding the social structures of past societies is getting a glimpse of how smaller groups of people interacted with one another, through trade, seasonal migration, inter-marriage, etc. The questions that drive ceramic petrography reflect not only this interest in movement, but also an interest in what the microstructure of a vessel can tell researchers about how it was made. Questions • • •

•

What minerals and rocks are present? What geographical area(s) are potential sources for the rocks and minerals present? What was the life cycle of the pot (i.e. what can we surmise about the raw materials, processing, forming, decoration, firing, use, and discarding of the pot)? What can the mineral microstructure of a pot tell us about human behavior?

The questions start with the basics of mineralogy, which is one way of (attempting to) objectively describe and categorize the natural world, and end with an application of that scientific knowledge to archaeological objects in order to say something about the human behavior that resulted in the production, use, and movement of those objects.

“For the Next Four Days It’s as if You’re in a Geology Class” Other than the microscope, the main tool for TSP is vocabulary. The first four days of the ten-day course were basically a fast-paced introduction to

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optical mineralogy. In terms of being a participant observer, I confess that, when Prof. Q started the lessons on identifying minerals and rocks, I fell right back in to ‘student mode’ and the two binders’ worth of notes that I took on minerals, rocks, and what they look like under a microscope reflect that. Class days were composed of two and a half hours of lecture in the morning, followed by a three- to four-hour ‘practical’ in the afternoon. Prof. Q took the class through seventeen basic minerals one by one, showing us pictures that highlighted each mineral’s characteristics as seen in PPL and XP, giving us the information we needed to fill out a mineral information chart as we went along. We noted the characteristics of each mineral (e.g. shape, color, pleochroism, relief, cleavage, interference color, extinction, and twinning), the combination of which help one determine what kind of minerals are present in the thin section. In terms of mineral identification, there are right and wrong answers, and as a student being asked to classify minerals in thin section, you look for identifying features. Some minerals can be identified in PPL, simply by rotating the slide platform to reveal, for instance, the ‘tartan plaid’ twinning of microline feldspar. The identification of most minerals, however, necessitates a glimpse of them in XP. For example, the mineral that appears oblong and green-brown in PPL is either amphibole or biotite, and, although the former may be a little more green and the latter a little more yellow, if the mineral is part of a clay that has been fired, then color is not a reliable diagnostic; the difference between the two can be seen in XP where turning the stage reveals that amphibole will appear ‘speckly’ before it goes into extinction (i.e. before the light hits it at an angle such that the interference colors are no longer visible and it simply appears dark in color). After we learned how to identify the different minerals in thin section, we moved on to the identification of different kinds of rocks. Generally speaking, rocks are agglomerations of crystals of one or more minerals. The three kinds of rock, igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic, come into being by different processes and/or in different physical circumstances, though there is overlap between the categories. Each kind of rock has a number of sub-kinds, and for these subdivisions there is a general system of classification based on grain size and the proportions of specific minerals, for example, differentiating between intermediate and acidic igneous rocks, where you have the same basic ingredients (i.e. quartz, feldspar, amphibole, biotite, muscovite), but different proportions of those ingredients (e.g. quartz makes up a small percentage of intermediate igneous rocks but accounts for 20 to 40% of acidic igneous rock). Making determinations such as this is a “semi-quantitative” judgment in that one is estimating “how much” of each mineral is present. There is, of course, a way to quantify these chemically, but Prof. Q explained that “it takes forever” and went on to assert that an estimate works just as well for thin-section petrography. He added that it takes “time and experience” to figure out how the pieces fit together. His final comment was, “rocks vary, really”, especially as chemistry will change the appearance of rocks (and the minerals within them) as they weather. This variation is further exacerbated when trying to identify rocks as inclusions within pottery fabric.

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The Typology: Classifying Ceramics With Thin Section After the groundwork is laid for the classification of rocks, Prof. Q transitions to a discussion of clay, because, as he explained, “pottery is also made out of clay”. In short, clay is formed by the weathering of rocks. There are different ways to define ‘clay’, according to grain size, a mineralogical definition, a chemical definition, the textbook ‘standard’ definition (i.e. Rice, 2015), or a potter’s definition (which Prof. Q suggested might run along the lines of, clay is “what you make a pot out of”). Different definitions belie different perspectives; a geologist, for example, wouldn’t go to a rock and look for clay, but a prehistoric Native American potter could crush, grind, soak, sieve—all of this to create clay. It is this latter perspective that ethnographic work would reveal to the archaeologist. “Go Pots!” The composition of ceramics is: clay matrix, inclusions, and voids. Petrography helps most with inclusions, which make up 10 to 40% of earthenware ceramics. Inclusions can be natural (i.e. part of the clay) or they can be added as temper; both natural inclusions and temper can be (further) modified by the firing of the pot or by continued exposure to heat through use. Inclusion identification is further complicated by the fact that one is usually dealing with tiny pieces of rock. Prof. Q explained that ceramic petrographers are “pushing the limits of optical mineralogy with rocks in ceramics because there are such small pieces” (Figure 5.3). Archaeologists usually look at pottery in assemblages, looking for patterning between samples. Looking toward the classification of ceramics in thin section begins with a qualitative visual approach (“group first, then

Figure 5.3 A view down the scope

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describe”). Prof. Q was quite pointed in saying that ceramic TSP begins with a qualitative sweep through the slides; a quantitative approach “characterizes first and then groups”. Typology by Grouping Our introduction to the TSP ‘typology’ (not that it was called that) came through a discussion of grouping. “Everything in science is about patterning and grouping”, Prof. Q began, adding, “everything in life is about patterning and grouping”. Many kinds of variations exist within clay composition that have to do with texture, shape, and microstructure, though Prof. Q stressed the idea that pottery fabric can’t be categorized by a single or simple criteria. Pottery fabric is “not lent to a numerical definition” so one needs to take a descriptive, visual approach. Pottery fabric classification is “what we write down”; we make groups, “classify by eye and characterize by words”. The visual approach can depend on the user doing it but it is “effective and flexible as it adapts to different kinds of questions”. What’s dug out of the ground is an assemblage, which is a subset of artifacts that reflect a site, layer, or vessel (depending on the scope of the research questions). One can study a single artefact, but archaeologists are more likely to be looking at an assemblage, and the petrographer would “get them on a tray, look down the scope, and group them”. The PowerPoint slide definition of a group, as given by Prof. Q is “a thin section or a group of sections with a specific combination of inclusions, clay matrix and voids, that differs from the other samples in the assemblage” (Day 7, “Grouping”). Prof. Q asserted numerous times that grouping thin-section slides is an endeavor best suited for the human eye; “the eye can detect patterns that computers can’t”. The grouping process should be approached as being intuitive; “you don’t need to understand what you’re seeing; you can do it by the feel”. For Prof. Q, the ‘feel’ of a pottery fabric is a combination of inclusion size and color, along with its general composition. The simple presence or absence of the same inclusion should not be a determining factor; grouping should depend more on separating slides with big differences, not minor ones. To complete the slide-grouping practical, Prof. Q advised us to group the slides once (quickly), write down the groups, take a break, come back and shuffle slides, and sort them again to see if we’d get the same groups. In reference to grouping thin-section slides, Prof. Q brought up the ‘lumper versus splitter’ struggle and recommended leaning toward lumping, stating that “you can divide endlessly, but how do you interpret the cultural significance of that?” The emphasis of the lesson was the assignation of cultural significance to groupings made. Fabric Groups Petrographic fabric is a recipe that details how the ingredients (the raw materials) are assembled (the technical practices) to produce a paste that is

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then used to make a pot. Vessels made of the same fabric are composed of the same raw materials that have been combined in the same way. Fabric is more closely related to ‘paste’ than it is to the final product because firing can obscure fabric somewhat. Some fabric classes are more closely related to one another than others, and the more samples that you have, the more variation you see. Researchers (interacting with the sample size) decide how large or small their fabric groups will be. Large groups are more ‘elastic’ and will show more variety, whereas smaller groups can be tighter (i.e. more similar). Researchers can create subdivisions within a fabric group; sub-fabrics differ from one another in a minor but significant way (e.g. a clear-cut difference in the size or amount of temper). If one finds pastes made from the same recipe except for one clear-cut difference in something ‘important’ (e.g. a clear difference in grain size), and there are multiple examples of each kind, then one can assume an intentional difference, that the potter made different choices in creating different pastes. Sometimes, of course, there are ‘loners’, single examples within an assemblage. The loners would then compose a group of one. Samples may also be grouped into relatively large fabric families that show broad relationships between petrographical fabrics (e.g. igneous versus metamorphic fabrics, fine versus coarse). According to Prof. Q, the grouping or classifying thin sections should be undertaken independently of all other information, such as date or vessel shape; groups can be evaluated in terms of those factors later. In a homogenous assemblage (in terms of how they appear in thin section), one might need that information sooner to “shuffle them around to see if that helps; are they all jars or are the all old, etc.”. Prof. Q finds this practice “kind of suspect”, warning of the temptation to “make groups where there aren’t any”. Once one has settled on a final grouping, the next formal task is the preparation of formal fabric descriptions, putting together the “words, sentences, pages of writing” that these definitions entail. Once groups have been established (once classification has taken place), one can look at the descriptions and characteristics and interpret a “signal about who they are and what they’re doing”. Prof. Q looks at the movement of ceramics and the human activities responsible for it, from production location (usually the source of the clay—if pots didn’t move, we wouldn’t need to do this) to their successive location(s) through trade or migration. This is where we see the application of thin-section information with macrolevel information about vessel use, shape, size, style, and decoration. TSP doesn’t stand alone; it is always applied to archaeological context. Though you disregard context when looking down the scope at thin sections, you put the artifacts they came from back in context later. Whitbread (2001) writes that “ceramics are synthetic material and as such are sensitive indicators of human decision-making and materials interaction” (p. 449). The series of decision-points surrounding the production of ceramics is referred to as a chaıˇne operatoire, which covers the

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“different stages of tool production from the acquisition of raw materials to the final abandonment of the used object” (Bar-Yosef et al., 1992, p. 511). The chain of operations has social meaning (Sillar & Tite, 2000) and the specific set of steps involved in the production of vessel (choices and actions) can be considered ‘technical style’. The concept of the chaine represents a life cycle of use, discard, recycling, excavation, and preservation, which in recent applications has been expanded to include the choices about ingredients, techniques, and aesthetic attributes not used or made as well (cf. Dobres, 2000). How Quantitative Data Fits in Though Prof. Q would probably not describe the work that he does as ‘qualitative’, he does contrast his ‘visual’ method of thin-section classification with quantitative methods, which he explained could be called in to play if a) you can’t “collect data by eye” or b) if you need to confirm (or supplement) a written fabric description. The quantitative data that Prof. Q was referring to is provided by point counting or line counting (counts taken at specific point intervals or counts of everything that appears on a line), which yield similar sorts of data. Quantitative data for approximately 300 inclusions (rocks or minerals) is the standard and then principle component analysis is applied to the data to find groups, “but they were probably obvious to the eye”. About principle component analysis, Prof. Q had this to say: “If you need to turn to stats to split hairs, maybe those differences aren’t significant”. For this reason, Prof. Q recommended doing visual analysis first, turning to point or line counting for backup only if one needs it. With visual data, “hopefully you can detect and characterize archaeologically meaningful patterns in terms of raw materials and technology”. One of the reasons for his dim view of multivariate statistics via principle component analysis (which he describes as “basically a pattern recognition program”) and hierarchical cluster analysis seemed to stem from the idea that “for most of us mere mortals, these methods are a bit of a black box” and that these statistical packages “squish” the data. Although people claim that statistics-based groupings are more objective, Prof. Q maintained that users of these techniques are still choosing the principle components, normalizing the data, etc.; “the sequence of steps in the analysis makes it subjective too”. About instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA), Prof. Q had two critiques, the first being that “chemistry is blind to temper” (i.e. INAA results don’t discriminate between elements found in the clay fabric versus any inclusions), and the second being that INAA typically employs a statistics package that will “throw out outliers” that are not in the 95% certainty area. Prof. Q’s comment on this specifically is that this practice seems “a bit of a dodgy technique, I think”.

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Interpretation and Classification With TSP After the introduction to the basics of mineralogy, Prof. Q took the class through the production of a pot, always linking the process back to whether particular things could be detected via thin section and whether that detection could be significant (as well as when it is not significant: “We don’t need thin-section to look at incisions, but it’s cute when you see it”). Most of the classroom interactions between Prof. Q and the students were concentrated during the afternoon practicals, when it was common to hear Prof. Q correcting students’ assessments of what they were looking at under the microscope (e.g. “that’s not sand, that’s silt”, which refers to the designations on the Udden-Wentworth scale of grain size). In these cases, there was definitely a ‘right answer’ and a ‘wrong answer’, mostly because Prof. Q had pulled our sample thin sections from collections that he was already familiar with and, for the most part, had already-published formal descriptions. There were early hints, though, that the petrographer’s stance toward ceramic classification might not have a right/wrong dichotomy as its basis. Looking at a slide down the microscope during the Day 4 practical, Prof. Q commented, “My interpretation of this is vesicular basalt that has been filled up” (my emphasis). What’s under the lens of the scope is ‘real’ and yet how what appears there is evaluated is still a matter of interpretation, albeit an educated one. The language of the labeling of individual slides varies by researcher, though most use a site name and assemblage code (e.g. Lundewic 1, Topsham V5170, Cyclops Cave 36). The slide labels don’t tell you what you’ll find when you view them down the scope; they act more as bookkeeping measures. To classify slide specimens, one must first sort them into groups according to fabric group, after which the group is labeled with a name that characterizes the general description of the fabric (e.g. fossiliferous limestone fabric). General descriptions themselves can vary a great deal in terms of how detailed they are and what they focus on (mainly inclusions versus inclusions and clay matrix), and the fabric group names reflect that focus. Following is an example of a fabric group name and the accompanying ‘general description’ from one of Prof. Q’s handouts: • •

Fabric name: Amphibole-rich residual igneous fabric General description: This large heterogeneous coarse-fine grained fabric is characterized by the presence of generally poorly sorted, sub-angular to sub-rounded inclusions of quartz, plagioclase, and amphibole, which appear to have been derived from the weathering of a medium-grained intermediate igneous rock

Though the description mentioned that the fabric contains inclusions of quartz and plagioclase (feldspar), the name reflects only the fact that the fabric is “amphibole-rich” because quartz and feldspar are too commonplace

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to be distinguishing features. The presumed source of the mineral inclusions is the weathering of igneous rock (reflected by the “residual igneous” portion of the fabric name). Though the names for slides and fabric types are embedded with both geographical and geological information, those names are only meaningful in terms of how they can be used to illuminate the movement of past societies. For example, Quinn and Burton (2016) describe two types of prehistoric California wares found at a single site, a Buff Ware and a Brown Ware. The term ‘buff’ is used throughout the study of West Coast ceramics since the 1950s, often in conjunction with a geographical location (e.g. Black Mesa Buff, Carrizo Buff, Lower Colorado Buff), although Quinn and Burton use mineralogical descriptions, such as “grog and sand-tempered biotite-rich sedimentary” and “grog-tempered fine sedimentary” as labels for their fabric types. The value in such classifications lies in matching the rocks found within the clay fabric to geological samples in order to ascertain the provenance (source) of raw materials and then also the “patterns of movement” of those materials (2016, p. 290). It is interesting to note here that, because “it is usually assumed that clay and temper were obtained close to the site of pottery production” (p. 290), it is most likely that it was a finished product that was transported from place to place. Given the evidence, Quinn and Burton evaluate the likelihood of a number of social processes, including seasonal migration, trade and/or exchange, “community interaction at a ‘central place’ ”, and shifts in settlement density (pp. 292–3). The authors conclude that further investigation is needed to tease apart the social processes that account for the “multiple origins” of the site’s ceramics, and call for “the interpretation of scientific data within a well-structured archaeological and anthropological framework that includes a secure chronology and comparative data from other sites” (2016, p. 294). In the case of petrographical analysis, the category labels point to some kind of socially motivated movement, albeit indirectly, which is what the categories mean for the archaeologist with the background knowledge to interpret them. That background knowledge is part of the practice of being a TSP-studying archaeologist, though hardhats do contribute to the overall performance.

In the Field: If You’re Wearing a Hardhat, You’re a Geologist As part of the intensive course, the class went on an excursion to Kent to visit the cliffs, whose bare faces offer the opportunity for in-person examination of the kinds of stratigraphy that we discussed in class. We went ‘into the field’ with hardhats, two hammers, and a handful of plastic bags for samples. Similar to the sentiments expressed by Yarrow (2003) in saying that “archaeology makes archaeologists” (p. 71), our behaviors created a dual identity that Prof. Q described as he referred to our group as “tramping over the landscape, looking like a geologist like we were, trespassing and thinking like an archaeologist”. On the way up and across

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the cliffs, we paused when Prof. Q asked a couple of students to dig holes, scoop out dirt from the holes, and then mix that earth with water to make ‘clay’. We all took turns attempting to mold the resulting clay, assessing whether we thought a small vessel could be fashioned from it. Prof. Q asked a lot of questions of us that called on us to apply our knowledge of rocks and minerals to the ‘real world’, an application that aimed to pull together the ‘hand specimen’ and the thin section. While we were in the field, we collected samples of dirt, clay, and rocks, and we hunted for fossils amid the boulders lining the shore beneath the cliffs. We paid extra attention to the cliffside itself, Prof. Q pushing us to draw connections between the rocks we had seen in thin section in the lab and how their formation appears as it plays out across a landscape, connecting the macro- and micro-landscapes.

Follow-Up Interview: “Just an Instinctive Matching of Patterns” As part of a follow-up interview, I asked Prof. Q to look at a set of slides under the microscope and think aloud about what he saw; he went into some detail about the first slide and then moved through the rest of the stack quickly, sorting them into groups. What follows is a lengthy interview excerpt of Prof. Q’s articulation of what he was viewing ‘down the scope’ for the initial slide: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20

I’m looking in XP and I see lots of white quartz, featureless quartz, I see things with stripes in them which is plagioclase feldspar the same color as quartz, so the distinguishing feature is the twinning and I can see the more colorful biotite and amphibole (.) I have to go to PPL, I was looking in XP, I have to go to PPL and then I can see that the amphibole is green and the biotite is brown it’s also got a more elongate shape to it, so I’m using shape, optical properties in two kinds of light, um it’s nice, it’s got lots and lots of inclusions in it, poorly sorted and angular, the stripes and the color make it pretty which is good (.) it’s got brown clay surrounding everything holding it together um if I was going to, what am I classifying? that was classifying inclusions, so some are single inclusions of minerals are broken, broken off and then there’s a few which are rock fragments meaning that they’re still stuck together as they were in the original rocks (.) not a lot of those, but through using those you can, I can start to reconstruct what rock broke down to form this clay material ’cause I think it’s mostly, most of the inclusions are coming from a single rock type, but I don’t have enough of those in here but I just know through experience having seen this fabric before that you’ve got, that it’s coming from a kind of a diorite, so a coarse grain plutonic igneous rock with feldspar quartz amphibole and biotite, maybe a quartz diotite (.) I don’t see anything, I don’t see much having had much done to it by humans,

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other than make it into a pot, can’t see any, doesn’t look like it’s had temper added, doesn’t look like it’s been, had any grog added or plant matter, anything that wasn’t, couldn’t’ve already been in the clay material (.) can’t see any pellets from the addition of, from the crushing up and rehydrating of clay, probably looks a lot, quite a lot like the original clay source that was used but they might have picked out larger lumps and roots and so on and now I’m not talking about classification anymore (.) but this is what I’m thinking looking at this, and see the surface where the vessel the surface of the vessel, it’s got a little, it’s pretty flat from smoothing the surface probably, it’s got cracks in it (.) looks dry but it is not that porous actually (.) the amphibole’s green which means it’s not fired below 750, not fired above 750 (.) decent amount of oxygen during firing cause its similar color throughout.

One of the first things to notice about this interview excerpt is the repetition of phrases such as “I see”, “I can/can’t see”, or “it does/doesn’t look like”, all of which seem naturally reflective of the fact that, as someone ‘thinking out loud’ over the eyepiece of a microscope, Prof. Q was the only one who can physically see what lay down the scope, and his audience (which was myself and another course attendee) could not. Though he questioned the notion that “classification” was actually what he was doing by verbally walking us through his approach to a thin section (see lines 10, 27), Prof. Q’s observations of what he saw mirrored the steps that his course taught his students to take in order to (ultimately) classify ceramic thin sections. Starting with the minerals that could be distinguished in PPL and XP, Prof.Q listed quartz, feldspar, biotite, amphibole (lines 1–4), explaining that he evaluated “shape [and] optical properties in two kinds of light” in order to make these identifications (line 6–7). Just as he had taught us to do in class, Prof. Q moved from minerals to rocks. Though many minerals had broken off and were in isolation as inclusions in the clay matrix, Prof. Q explained that “through using those you can, I can start to reconstruct what rock broke down to form this clay material” (lines 13–14). This statement makes it seem like that, for TSP, classification is the product of an additive process, but the quick shift from “you can” to “I can” hints at what else feeds into petrographical classification: experience. Prof. Q references his own experience with this particular fabric (line 16) and then explained how what he sees under the scope is linked to the behavior of the pottery’s producers in terms of what they selected as raw materials and the firing temperature (lines 20–22, 31–32). For the remainder of the recorded ‘think aloud’ session, Prof. Q proceeded to move through the rest of the slides, placing them on the microscope platform, giving them a look, and then placing them on a tray in separate piles. The following is excerpted from the continuation of that conversation, immediately succeeding the preceding excerpt and my asking if he used a working description of the clay fabric in order to sort slides or whether

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he just used a visual impression to sort them. The transcript text is broken up with indicators of the points where Prof. Q removed one slide from the microscope platform and inserted another: 34 just a visual impression yeah so if I grab one I wouldn’t need to go through 35 anything say check it’s got that, it’s got that, it’s got that, I can just, [slide] 36 I mean anyone can do it just go straightaway just say nope that’s different [slide] 37 saw lots of, loads of biotite in that one. I happen to know this material so that 38 helps [slide] 39 40 41 42 43

and this one I can say huh, it looks similar slightly darker though so I’m disregarding the color of the clay material I can see the amphibole, the plagioclase feldspar and the biotite straight away so that tells me that’s similar so I would look in more detail then but you need, it’s just the initial sorting [slide]

44 similar 45 [AB: and you would do it just about that fast?] 46 yeah, I think most people could [slide] 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54

that one immediately visually looks different it hasn’t got the colorful amphiboles and the biotite immediately it’s got a different texture, different color, texture, different feel to it [looking up from microscope] ‘feel’ means not physical feel but just a look to it, impression I think like Snap, although Snap is you’re looking at the number, you’re looking at the number and you’re looking at the suit aren’t you of the card, you know the card game [. . .]

55 56 57 58 59 60 61

You can do a lot from just the look, quick, feel of things you can already sort it out and making sense of something is, you know, you could be cleaning out your attic or something and you want to tidy and everything’s jumbled up, you quickly sort things so that’s all over there I’m going to throw that stuff away you need to break the back of it first before you can really start to clear out the attic and that involves sort of a large scale sorting first before you do it (.) just an instinctive matching of patterns

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During the slide-sorting, Prof. Q changed slides, on average, every eight seconds. He described his visual approach as specifically not checklist-like (line 34–35). He maintained that the visual sorting process is instinctive and that “most people could” do it (line 46). He stressed how quickly these decisions are made at the scope, saying that one side is “straight away [. . .] similar” (line 41–2) while another “immediately visually looks different” (line 47). What is it that looks similar or different? Prof. Q explains that it’s the “feel” of the slide that distinguishes one sample from another. For him, ‘feel’ refers to texture and color (line 49) that in combination with other factors creates an “impression” (line 51). Prof. Q compared this kind of quick, seemingly instantaneous decision-making with that demanded by the card game ‘Snap’ (lines 52–54), in which you have to call out when overturned cards match, and to the process that one would go through to clean out an attic: “just an instinctive matching of patterns” (lines 56–61). Prof. Q continued to emphasize via email that humans are simply better classifiers than computers: “We are better at classifying complex objects/patterns as we can fill in the gaps easier and make decisions about what to prioritise” (pers. comm., 9/11/2017). For Prof. Q, pattern-finding is a natural human ability that can be utilized in TSP to sort ceramic fabrics into groups.

Conclusion In TSP, when you classify a sample as being an example of a particular fabric, you are saying that it has the same ingredients and was produced in the same manner as other members of that group. A pottery fabric is thus conceptualized in the same way we often think about dialects: as unique combinations of linguistic features used in similar proportions by speakers. The TSP categories are a good example of Shanks’ discussion of archaeological methods representing an understanding as; because the main contribution of TSP to archaeology is provenence, which means that a fabric group name “grog and sand-tempered biotite-rich sedimentary” comes from a geographical location in which there is biotite-rich sedimentary rock and comes from a production process that uses both sand and grog to temper clay. The label thus indirectly suggests the human behaviors of using clay from a particular place and mixing it with a particular kind of temper. How people do things reflects who they are as socially embedded human beings. For that reason, Prof. Q recommended folding in observations made through ethnographic and experimental archaeology to help interpret the categories and classifications that TSP yields. But interpreting the rationale behind technological choices of ancient potters is difficult. Perhaps some functional reasons behind choices made can be ascertained, such as adding temper to make a clay paste more workable, but the meaning(s) or motivation(s) behind many other choices may be “less tangible” and “less logical” to modern Western thinking. At the end of the day, though, the categories made by archaeologists are still their categories.

6

Classification via Reactor Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis

Introduction It seems safe to assume that any research based on results derived from something that happens inside of a nuclear reactor will at least have the appearance of falling on the science-end of any hypothetical continuum. Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) (Figure 6.1) entails bombarding an archaeological sample with neutrons in order to form radioactive isotopes, the emissions from which can be measured by an instrument (i.e. the “I” in INAA). The radioactive emissions (gamma rays) of elements are like signatures and are therefore a means of determining what elements, even if they are trace elements, were present in the sample. Characteristic energies for gamma rays are also emitted by each irradiated element, and the intensity of those energies can be used to determine the amount of each element that had been present in the sample. Different radioisotopes have different halflives, so multiple measurements are taken. The results of INAA can then be compared with that of other archaeological samples or to geological samples, the latter of which can help determine the source of the ceramic material. The most well-known facility for this kind of archeological research is the Missouri University Research Reactor (MURR). I was able to visit MURR and speak with the team of archaeologists who work as research faculty there, Dr. F (who was my main point of contact), Dr. G (the senior team member), and Dr. M (the newest member of the team). Visitors are not allowed to bring cameras or laptops into the facility, though I did have permission to use a small digital recorder for the interviews. After donning a radiation monitor lanyard, I was taken by two of the MURR archaeologists on a tour of the facility, through the lab where samples are sent through pneumatic tubes into the reactor core for irradiation as well as the lab where the irradiated samples are kept. At MURR, the archaeologists take a reading at twenty-five minutes, another after one week, and then one more after four weeks in order to detect elements with a range of half-lives (other facilities that do INAA only do the first two readings). The facility tour ended with a pass through an airlock and into the reactor containment facility, where Dr. F, Dr. M, and I stood and looked down on

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Target Nucleus

Prompt Gamma Ray

Beta Particle

Radioactive Nucleus

Incident Neutron

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Compound Nucleus

Product Nucleus

Delayed Gamma Ray

Figure 6.1 Instrumental neutron activation analysis Adapted from Nahar, Schmets and Scarpas, 2015, p. 5

the reactor core workers as they raised and lowered containers within the blue-glowing water that surrounds the reactor core. As we left containment, we passed through one of the several radiation detectors that separate different areas of the facility. After the tour, Dr. F took me to his office, where he talked to me about how he analyzes INAA data, creating ‘type’ groups based on the elemental properties of the ceramic samples.

Classification Using INAA Data Archaeological samples being prepared for INAA are ground into powder, encased in quartz, and placed in a sterile tube to be sent by pneumatic tube into the reactor. The actual physical task of loading the tubes is handled by a student worker (who I think was an English major), who needs to be attentive to a timer, but who does not otherwise deal with the INAA data that are produced (or the interpretive analysis that follows). There are a number of ways to approach the data in terms of analysis. Dr. F walked me through his approach, using some data he was engaged with at the time as an example. Collecting INAA data obviously takes a very special facility, but the analysis evidences a familiar tug-of-war: quantitative or qualitative?

Interacting With INAA Data As Dr. F explained, once you have the INAA data, there are a number of ways to deal with it, the most common of which is to “take the data, throw multivariate statistics at it, and have it generate groups”. Dr. F’s research group, however, uses a different approach, one developed by his mentor while he was working at the Smithsonian that then traveled to MURR when

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he did. This method is “much more iterative and visual [in] dealing with the data, so we don’t just sort of throw it in a cluster analysis and whatever clusters come out, that’s our groups”. The MURR researchers use a program adapted from other social sciences to create a bivariate plot of the presence of two elements in parts per million (ppm). The data that Dr. F showed me was from a project dealing with prehistoric pottery of the Southwest and how the geographical distribution of that pottery connects to a “dramatic social change” that occurred in that area. “So basically we have lots of migration going on, you have communities that are involving migrants, locals, all different mix of people, and so they’re trying to create some kind of common system to sort of bring these groups together”. One of the pottery types made in the area, the Salado type, spreads over time; “early on it looks like they’re making it in specific locations and then it’s wider trade. Later it looks like they’re starting to make it everywhere, and it changes a little bit through time, so all these interesting social dynamic questions we’re trying to get at um, and so, but nobody has ever brought all this Salado into one project”. Dr. F explained his process, using the Salado pottery project as an example: What I tend to do is do things visually (.) I literally, I will just visually look at this arrays of plots [. . .] so what I’m usually looking at then is this [indicates on computer screen] I’m going to go to a plot like this, and look at those three samples and say, ‘OK, do they stay together?’ (.) obviously they separate on one element on the X-axis, and I’m looking at all thirty-two other elements on the Y-axis (.) do they stay together? (.) and they do (.) generally there’s a few elements where they vary but in a lot of the very precise trace elements they’re staying really tight on the Y-axis, so I’m going to call that a group (.) now there’s additional statistical testing we would do later, so there’s a group (.) now if we eliminate that one and start looking at what’s left, here’s a group that pulls out in calcium. AB: so you do one element at a time? DR. F: I’m doing kind of one group at a time, so I’m trying to see, I might look at calcium for that group, but it may also pull out and something else (.) so it looks like that group pulls out primarily in calcium, or and manganese (.) here’s another group that’s pulled out here (.) so once I’ve isolated a group, I remove it and then continue to look at what’s left (.) just pull one group out. DR. F:

What Dr. F does, then, is create groups based on how they are clustered on the bivariate plot, visually pulling together points that cluster together (Figure 6.2 is an example of the resulitng bivariate plot). Dr. F does this one group at a time, repeating the process until everything that can be grouped is grouped. He does exclude “unassigned samples” as he had rather “leave a sample like that out and refine this group”, which results in “tighter

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Figure 6.2 Resulting bivariate plot in which ellipses represent 90% statistical confidence (Ferguson, pers. communication 10/18/17)

groups with more unassigned, but we have greater statistical confidence in those groups”. This is where Dr. F tries to strike a balance between how much is left unassigned and how tightly correlated one wants the group members to be, always with an eye to what the issue of assigned/unassigned “has to do with how they’re making the pottery”. This concept of “how they’re making the pottery” is a driving factor behind the classification. Dr. F and his colleagues are looking for “not just a technological significance, but something culturally significant”. Cultural information can be derived from numbers: “What that’s showing us is what stuff is traded versus and being moved, maybe as migrations or what’s being produced where”. Dr. F explained that he prefers to enter into the grouping phase of data analysis “completely blind”, meaning that he makes groups based on the distribution of elemental data (and not on knowledge of the site or on specific vessel characteristics, such as shape, decoration, etc.). This is a different kind of ‘blind’, though, than one sees with the application of multivariate statistics. Much like Prof. Q (see Chapter 5), Dr. F questions the efficacy of such analytical methods. Even if one sample is tossed out from the beginning because of some elemental anomaly, it will be given a chance later and will be included in the multivariate statistics that follow the visual grouping. The

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statistics are left for last because a statistics package can’t connect numbers to culture. The visual approach to INAA looks at “arrays of plots, whereas a multivariate approach will often just pick the closest match based on just distance regardless of what that may mean”.

The Ongoing Saga of TSP Versus INAA If the reader will recall, Prof. Q critiqued INAA on the grounds that the data produced by this method is “nothing but chemistry”; that is, INAA provides a list of elements but nothing else. Prof. Q took to task what he perceived as INAA’s reduction of a pot to a “dot on a bivariate chart”. Prof. Q also took issue with the INAA archaeologists’ practice of excluding samples that don’t fit into groups. The view of these practices does, of course, appear different from the other perspective. The archaeologists at MURR do analyses of elemental data and do plot samples on bivariate charts, but the critique that what they do is “chemistry” misses the fact that their evaluation of their data includes a visual grouping component that, in some ways, is very similar to the visual sorting aspect of TSP. Dr. F explained that petrographical sorting (i.e. the creation of groups of thin-section slides) is a different approach than that carried out in INAA analysis: It’s very different (.) they can have thirty sherds and have thirty types, thirty different groups (.) whereas I never have a group of one (.) right? (.) to me that’s not a group, that’s an individual outlier (.) it’s not necessarily meaningless, unassigned are interesting (.) but it is very different. Whereas Prof. Q would never consider simply ‘leaving out’ a sample, preferring instead to have a group of one, Dr. F will omit so-called outliers in order to maintain a higher level of statistical confidence that group members do indeed belong in the same group. Despite the fact that the two groups appear rather suspicious of each other, Dr. F often collaborates with petrographers in his analyses. The two approaches do seem complementary. Thin-section petrography and INAA are both perceived as being on the same end of the humanistic-to-scientific continuum, yet the two approaches to ceramics analysis can produce conflicting analyses of the same data. For example, as a follow-up to a 2002 analysis of Mesoamerican pottery using INAA (Neff & Glascock, 2002); Blomster, Neff, and Glascock (2005) applied INAA to ceramic samples from the Olmec region of the Mexican Gulf Coast. They found that, of the 1000 samples analyzed, 725 fell into fifteen “regionally specific compositional groups” while the remaining samples fell into three “unassigned groups” (p. 1070). The authors describe the fifteen groups as “discriminated well by the 32 elements retained for analysis” (p. 1070). The social issue addressed by the authors has to do with reciprocity in terms of trade and stylistic innovation. The article refers to labels such as

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“Olmec-style” and “Oaxaca-style”, stating that “INAA data contradict the model that regional exports can be identified simply by style”, adding that Olmec pottery was not part of a “mutual exchange” system, but instead was exported by the Olmec, who then did “not import any foreign pottery with Olmec-style symbols” (p. 1071). This one-way avenue of trade and innovation has further implications, as it supports the idea of “Olmec priority in the creation and spread of the first unified style and iconographic system in Mesoamerica” (p. 1068). A few months later, Stoltman et al. (2005), used petrographical data to “contradict recent claims that the Gulf Coast was the sole source of pottery carved with iconographic motifs” (p. 11213). These authors contend that the earlier analysis “relie[d] on chemical elements rather than actual minerals, as important limitations in its ability to identify nonlocal pottery from within large data sets” (p. 11213). They point out that, in the initial article, Neff and Glascock acknowledge that two of the sample types show a “troublesome similarity” that they deem “remarkable considering the geographical separation of several hundred km” (Neff & Glascock, 2002, p. 10; qtd Stoltman et al., 2005, p. 11214). Stoltman and colleagues comment that “petrographic analysis easily separates the two groups”, as one contains “gneiss and volcanic tuff” whereas the other is “tempered with fine quartzitic or calcareous sand” (p. 11214), inclusions that would have the similar mineral make-up, but would differ in proportion and in grain size. According to these authors, instead of appearing to be pottery from one place, petrographical analysis found that the “mineralogical contrasts were striking” (p. 11216), which then suggests to them that “clearly, exchanges of pottery between the Olmec and their highland neighbors were reciprocal” (p. 11217). The point here is that ‘science’ will produce different results in terms of grouping and classification depending on the method used; both the examination of elements and of thin sections is seemingly objective, but the categories (and the social context that they imply) are “contextualized interpretations” of the data (Croft & Cruse, 2004, p. 99).

Unhooking Classification From Labels The assignation of samples to a group is only part of the categorization process. Once groups are divided, most of the time they are then labeled, a fact that I brought up during a group interview with Dr. F and his MURR archaeology colleagues, Dr. M and Dr. G. I began our group conversation with a thought that had occurred to me during my interview with Dr. F, which, as it happened, hit at an issue that they themselves had recently been discussing: the assignation of labels to groups: 1 AB: so it doesn’t seem like you end up necessarily worrying so much about 2 putting labels on the groups that you end up extrapolating

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Classification via Reactor Dr. F: [laughs] We were just talking about this yesterday Dr. M: they’re so fluid, right? (.) these groups, they change, that’s what multivariate statistics ultimately results in, right? Dr. F: But it’s not considered, so it kind of depends on who you’re working with. So the other example, I’ve, I don’t think I’ve ever named a group the entire time I’ve been here (.) Dr. F: I’ve got ‘one’, ‘two’, ‘three’, ‘four’, ‘five’, um and that’s all I’ve ever used, and I may say group two is clearly made here from what I can tell and so on so forth. The other extreme would be HN, who was the archaeologist who was here kind of a long time long before I got here, um, he named every group (.) and I’m not saying, there’s nothing inherently wrong about it but as an example I was telling Dr. M just, we were just talking about this yesterday, he did this project of uh early redware in the San Juan area, San Juan basin (.) and you know he assigned names to all these groups, ‘this is the Duckfoot group’, ‘this is the this group’, because most of the sherds came from the Duckfoot site (.) well the initial site study only included five sites (.) it turns out the stuff he’s calling Duckfoot wasn’t made at Duckfoot, it was made at Five Pueblos nearby, Duckfoot just happened to be the main recipient (.) so now we have this Duckfoot group as it’s called on one site but in reality it probably wasn’t made there, so to me assigning those labels gives it meaning that I’m not comfortable giving it (.) I’m happy to say majority of it’s coming from here, we’ve got clays from here that match, it’s probably from here, or we could call it the ‘Eastern Valley such and such group’, but even that I’m not so sure (.) to me assigning that name, it gives it more meaning than we’veDr. M: and people who are the consumers of a lot of the data will cling to those names too, and they will just get stuck in the literature forever and people like us who understand how that can change we’re like ‘no no no, it’s not that’, and it gets misinterpreted and like it just creates this palimpsest in that everyone’sDr. F: I’m happy to give them names, but yeah you’re giving it more meaning and that’s, we’re talking about the researcher on the other end who may not understand that it doesn’t mean it is the Duckfoot group AB: Yeah, because when you’re talking about the fluidity of the groups, you’re talking about the fact that, I mean, even if you did find a group, and okay it’s from there we’re going to name it that, that group’s not going to stay the same over time (.) is that what you’reDr. M: the group is an idea, right, so but we are attaching it to a space, to a time, and that can change as we add more information and different understanding, like from other archaeological evidence, and there’s more data even, right? (.) so you have to be prepared to [laughs] Dr. F: and I think a lot ofDr. G: you could be absorbing samples or you could actually ultimately split those which you have as more greater quantities of data become available

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Dr. F: I think a lot of it has to do, if you were to look and compare my approach to HN’s approach, I think a lot of it has to do with the time that we were both doing this kind of research (.) so HN was doing it at a lot of times when you would get a new region and you’d only get two hundred samples (.) and that may be it, it’s all you ever got (.) and I’m doing it in a time where I’m rarely ever working in a new region and so everything I’m doing is a reworking of previous groups and so and I’ve worked in many regions where HN very legitimately created groups that there were no problems at the time they were made given the sample size, but looking at it now when you’ve gone from two hundred samples to fifteen hundred samples in that same basin, it doesn’t make the same sense anymore, and so I think that’s where why I’m more reluctant to assign labels to things because I’ve seen that transition that maybe in HN’s case he didn’t, he didn’t see that as much in those cases.

From this lengthy excerpt, we learn several things about classification and language and meaning. For Dr. F, “assigning those labels gives it meaning that I’m not comfortable giving” (lines 22–23). Groups are ideas attached to time and space, but the time and space can shift as more information comes to light (line 40). Groups are ideas, but it’s the label that gives the group meaning, a connection Dr. F mentioned several times (lines 22–23, 26–27, 33–35). For this reason, Dr. F himself prefers to use numbers as labels, referring to ‘Group 1’, ‘Group 2’, etc., which don’t have the same kind of meaning that a (usually location/place-based) label might impose on a group of artifacts, but which do have social meaning in that they do not imply association with a location or group of pottery producers/consumers, but instead create an association between the producers and consumers of archaeological analysis at MURR. Dr. M pointed out that the “consumers” of data will “cling” to group names, which then “get stuck in the literature forever”. She continued to explain that, despite warnings, people use the labels and “it gets misinterpreted and [. . .] creates this palimpsest”, which I interpret as being like layers of labels on top of scratched-off labels, the ones on the bottom never fully gone (lines 28–31). Groups are fluid because they change as the data change. Dr. F gave an example of the categories established long ago by a now-retired colleague, who labeled pottery type based on 200 samples from five sites, including a ‘Duckfoot’ type; however, years later (and with 1500 samples), it came to light that some of the samples labeled ‘Duckfoot’ were made somewhere else, likely having landed at the Duckfoot site through trade (lines 51–57). What this means is that today there are researchers out there using that label, “who may not understand that it doesn’t mean it is the Duckfoot group”. Labels give categories social meaning within archaeology. ‘Duckfoot’, for example, is a label tied to a particular place even if the pieces labeled as Duckfoot type are now known to have been produced somewhere else.

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Dr. M reiterated that a group “is an idea” and that they “are attaching it to a space, to a time”, but are doing so without adding a geography-based label, because they know that whatever attachments they make “can change as we add more information and different understanding” (lines 40–42). Thus the group is very much understood as an emergent entity; samples are sorted visually and the groups that are formed by the sorting are expected to change. The category names themselves are not emergent nor are they context-dependent (except inasmuch as the numbered label follows the number given before). The INAA archaeologists prefer it to be this way in order to avoid, not just inaccurate labels, but the social meaning(s) attached to them that are then difficult to dislodge, even in the face of new information. The working idea of a category is contextually dependent; the INAA archaeologists’ expressed belief that categories are fluid and changeable has emerged over time because of ongoing experiences with data and with prior research, which they view against the backdrop of scientific objectivity. Likewise, the understanding of any particular group is also emergent, given the interaction of data with labels, the social meaning attached to labels, and potentially conflicting information.

‘Science’ and ‘Numbers’ Aren’t the Same Thing As my exchange with the INAA archaeologists continued, they raised an interesting point about how some scholars appear to conflate ‘numbers’ and ‘science’: 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68 69 70 71 72 73 74 75 76 77

Dr. M: you’ve got the quantitative kind of people, like we talked about [indicating Dr. F], who literally plug it in and get something out (.) and I would say that is that is very different (.) ours is much more of, it may be an internal dialogue that we have with ourselves and the data, but those, this AB: I think that, yesDr. F: these groups don’t just came up, you know, these (.) a typical data set, I mean a relatively simple one I could look at in an afternoon and come up with groups and you know it makes sense, those are incredibly rare Dr. M: So there’s a series of decision-making that occurs at every step and you can see that it’s not just as like, spitting out numbers Dr. F: and there will be people though who will say that clearly that’s a flaw, that’s not science, right? (.) it’s not science (.) these are numbers, it should go into a machine, it should come out as groups, and no one should argue about it (.) and it’s like, no, we’re applying science to really complex human behavior, it’s not justAB: and human behavior is not clear cut Dr. F: right, exactly

Placed at odds in this discussion are two kinds of interaction, one characterized by both Dr. M and Dr. F as ‘black box–like’ in that numbers are

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entered into a computer program that runs statistics and spits out groups (lines 62, 70, 72–73). The other kind of interaction, the one Dr. M refers to as “ours” (line 63), is characterized as “an internal dialogue that we have with ourselves and the data” (line 64). The iterative process that Dr. F had walked me through earlier is partly quantitative, partly intuitive, based on (as Dr. M puts it) “a series of decision-making that occurs at every step” (line 69). And it is this second, more intuitive, approach that gets criticized as being “not science” (line 72), a phrase that Dr. F repeats before he relays what the critics would consider to be science: “these are numbers, it should go into a machine, it should come out as groups, and no one should argue about it” (line 72–73). From the perspective of Dr. F and Dr. M, what they are doing with INAA is “applying science to really complex human behavior” (lines 74–75), behavior that, as I added to the conversation, is “not clear cut” (line 76).

Conclusion Shanks and Tilley (1987) write that “classification is not independent of theory” (p. 83), and we see this clearly in the case of the INAA archaeologists at MURR. The idea that, through classification, one is enacting a theoretical stance recalls one of the underlying questions of this investigation: What are we doing when we name things? When we choose one label over another, such as a number instead of a geographical label for a sample group, that naming constitutes and reflects a specific practice; in this case, using numbers for samples that have been classified as belonging to the same group acts out an ideology whose discourse includes the idea that scientific understanding(s) of artifacts and locations are fluid and can change. Since there is in the archaeological literature an available set of labels, the choice not to use the location-based nomenclature is significant, especially as the existing labels are firmly entrenched in archaeologists’ writings about that area. In this case the process of grouping samples (of creating categories) is the result of an “internal dialogue” between researcher and data. Even though the archaeologist is physically removed from the artifact (which is now radioactive), it is still a discursive object in that its meaning is being constructed through an interaction that is ongoing.

7

Classification as Personal Interpretation

When you hold a pot in your hands, when you go over its walls with your fingers, you feel the hands of the potter, his fingermarks, his touch. You may not know who he was or what he looked like, but, handling the pot, be it hundreds or thousands of years old, you can still feel the imprint of his hands. It is this fact about a pot that makes it so endearing, so very personal. It makes the physical handling of a pot such an important part of its appreciation, as important as visual impact, and at times even more so. O. Natzler, Ceramics

Introduction Ethnoarchaeological methods, as applied to the production of ancient ceramics, have three stated goals: • • •

“To completely describe specific production systems” “To explain why those historically specific systems have developed (technologically and organizationally) and changed as they have” “To identify and explain cross-cultural regularities and variability in production systems” (Costin, 2000, pp. 377–378)

Like TSP and INAA, ethnoarchaeological approaches can address issues of ceramic production location and technology, but ethnography tries to do so from a ‘mind of the pottery-makers and pottery-users’ perspective. The emphasis of ethnography in archaeology is on the direct observation of the social, rather than on what geographical movement implies about the social. The ethnographer “step[s] away from talking about material culture as objects”, focusing instead on “artisans’ preparation of materials” (Christensen, 1995, p. 10). Ethnography concentrates on “things in process” and “materials in motion”, to include “phenomena like sound, taste, and smell” (1995, p. 20). Ethnographic work, such as that of van der Leeuw (1991), advocates the “re-creative approach” to pottery studies in order to look at potter behavior (p. 14), which means that observations of present-day

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pottery-making practices are applied via analogy to remains from the distant past. The ethnographic viewpoint believes that: Appropriately questioned, artifacts provide information on how humans coped with their environments, on their social arrangements, and on their systems of thought, or, put another way, how they acted on the world, on each other, and on themselves. (David & Kramer, 2001, p. 138) Ethnographic observation, then, affords the researcher a means of asking the right questions. The danger, however, of ethnography-based classifications seems to be the temptation to fuse (or confuse) etic and emic categories and labels. David and Kramer (2001) note that many ethnographic studies find that “although the potters shared ideal recipes for mixing clays and temper, actual pots showed much variation from the ideal”, which means that it would be difficult, if not impossible, for “emic mineralogical categories [to] be reconstructed from sherds” (p. 160). In addition, van der Leeuw (1991) finds that the use of a typological approach to ceramics creates confusion, as definitions and labels derived from real things are then used as ‘ideal’ types (p. 22). Van der Leeuw asserts that categories are “dependent on the moment and locus of definition (the here and now of the group of artifacts that was categorized), and therefore are, strictly speaking, useless in defining past units of time and space” (1991, pp. 22–23). The application of present-day observation to the study of prehistoric ceramics is fraught with challenges because of the very nature of human culture: “because cultures are complex and emergent from long and individual histories, and because similar products may result from diverse cases, such working backwards from effects to causes is impossible” (David & Kramer, 2001, p. 160). And yet, speaking with a present-day potter seems the closest link to experiences that a colonial potter may have had.

Talking With a Potter To make this part of my investigation more personal, I traveled to Seagrove, North Carolina, and spent an afternoon with a contemporary potter, MF, who makes ceramic reproductions for Old Salem exhibits and gift stores, as well as for Colonial Williamsburg (another ‘living history’ community located in Virginia). My interaction with MF took place during the time I was working at the Old Salem dig site, so a lot of our conversation revolved around the kiln being uncovered and Moravian pottery generally. Though I wouldn’t call my interview an ethnographic experience per se, I do think that talking to MF about the way that she approaches not only the creation of pottery but also the study of colonial forms and decoration was

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enlightening in terms of what it contributes to an understanding of classification as an emergent and context-specific process.

Ceramics Classification: View of a Potter For MF, interactions with pottery are both personally and financially motivated as she is by calling a potter who, for a portion of her livelihood, makes reproductions of colonial pots. Reproductions are not simply copies of other vessels, as the Oxford English Dictionary notes that making a reproduction entails “the action or process of forming, creating, or bringing into existence again”, a process that uses contemporary methods to produce again the styles and shapes found in the past. For MF, the difference between what she refers to as a copy and a reproduction has to do with whether harm is being done to the original potter. What she does in re-creating the pottery of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Moravians does no harm to them (financially or otherwise), while producing pieces that ‘copied’ those of Moravians at the time would have cut into their business. The categories that were relevant to MF, as a producer of pottery, appeared rooted in the contrast between utilitarian and decorative pottery, which then relates to whether the pottery would be likely to be decorated (utilitarian pottery is usually very plain) and how one determines if a piece of pottery should be discounted as a second or thrown away as a waster or reject. Seconds and wasters are types of flawed pots that differ in terms of the degree to which the piece is damaged; the former can be sold at a discount whereas the latter are tossed onto a pile of damaged or broken pottery, referred to as a waster dump (or waster pile or waster pit). MF talked about making the determination that a particular pot is a ‘second’ being partially based on the pot’s intended use. MF talked about the fact that the Moravian potters moved from producing mostly utilitarian pottery to making more decorative or ‘whimsical’ pieces, which would have affected what was considered a waster (or a second): MF: AB: MF: AB: MF: AB: MF:

but that must’ve changed what was a second and what was not a second, too to do the decoratives? Or to do like, the figurinesyeah, the figurines, if they had a little crack on the bottom it probably wouldn’t have mattered, ’cause nobody hardly used them anyway yeah but a milk crock? yeah you had to have it hold water.

A structural flaw in a non-utilitarian piece, as long as it occurs in an inconspicuous location, does not affect its function as a decorative item. But a flaw in decoration might. On the other hand, for a utilitarian piece, such

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as a milk crock or chamber pot, a structural flaw (such as a crack) might mean that the piece could no longer serve its purpose (e.g. a crack could indicate that the vessel is not watertight), but a flaw in glaze appearance, for instance, wouldn’t make any difference: MF: AB: MF: AB: MF: AB: MF:

but I would say probably, like if you think about a chamber pot yeah what would make a chamber pot a second? you know? it’s not waterproof [laughter] yeah, exactly, yeah (.) I mean, whereas a fancy plateright -that they figure never were used very much, that would (.) probably a little chip on the edge might make it a second (.) and we don’t have enough records to know.

From a potter’s perspective, the classification of a piece as a ‘second’ or as a ‘waster’ is dependent on the physical state of the object, the potter’s intention (i.e. what function the vessel was intended to perform), and the greater cultural context. A pot that exploded in the kiln can quite easily be deemed a waster, but a pot for which the flaw is less obvious would call for additional consideration. Whether ultimately determined as worthy of sale (though at a discount) or worthy of the waster pile would be dependent on the relationship between the type and extent of the flaw and the vessel’s intended purpose. In addition, the cultural context plays a role and influences, for example, how much variation is allowed in the final products, by a colonial master potter or by a contemporary potter such as MF. As for terms for vessel shape, MF navigates between old and new, using terms found in the historical Moravian documents, while also recognizing that her present-day, online customers might be using terms that are different: MF:

for instance (.) everything on legs is called a ‘pipkin’ now, which is a British term (.) it’s because the U.S. was predominately settled by the British (.) it’s because of that the archaeological community adopted ‘pipkin’ (.) whereas in Germany, it’s a cooking pot (.) why is it a pipkin?

MF makes the point that the Moravian records don’t necessarily show consistency in this regard either, though what she is referring to as a “pipkin” is called a “cook pot” in the pottery archives and a “legged cook pot” or “legged pot” by archaeologist Stanley South (1999, p. 250). To a linguist who studies variation, the idea that, as MF put it, “the same type of vessel is called different things at different times” comes as less of a surprise. Also not surprising is the fluidity of what a single term can apply to. MF commented, as she pointed to specific pieces of pottery on display in her shop, “this was a plate, this was a plate, this is not a plate”, making a discrimination

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based on size. She appeared to line up the terms she uses for her Moravian reproductions with those found in the original potters’ inventories, which do contain both dish and plate (based on monetary evaluation, the former was probably larger in diameter). She also indicated that the depth of the vessel made a difference in terms of what she called it, saying again, as she pointed to a flat vessel with slightly sloping sides, that: MF:

when you go back, sometimes they’re called ‘plates’ in potters’ records, but sometimes they’re called ‘dishes’ (.) ‘pie plate’ is a more modern term in general (.) it’s a dish (.) but if I put it on my website and label it as a ‘dish’, people call and say, ‘why don’t you make pie plates? I can’t find any’.

Linguists might be more comfortable with the idea that words and their meanings are “slippery customers” (a la Labov, 1973, p. 340), if for no other reason than this phenomenon is a boon to our livelihood (as opposed to a hindrance). Learning From a Waster Dump For the archaeologist, a waster dump can be a wealth of information about potters’ techniques, technologies, skill levels, etc. MF talked specifically about archaeologists’ extrapolations from waster dumps: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21

MF: but there’s things like quantity, you know they’re very bad about taking the waster pile and extrapolating from that how many of which things (.) we makeAB: right, right, figuring there’s a certain percentage that you, that youMF: yeah (.) exactly (.) whereas there are things out there that I did once and I hated it, and I buried the whole thing AB: yeah, that’s whatMF: yeah (.) and that would be, that would throw it way off AB: yeah, that’s the kind of thing I’m really interested in too MF: um, so that, you know there, there are things that just skew that way sometimes AB: Yeah MF: now, they would be less likely to throw away a whole kiln just ’cause they don’t like it, you know, like a color AB: that’s what you would figure MF: yeah, um, if you could somehow take the waster pile and take that kinda thing out it would still be a little skewed, because bigger things break more often than smaller things AB: Right MF: um, wide open things have more likelihood of something like a piece of brick falling in it than like, a mug, or even a pitcher, you know.

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22 AB: right 23 MF: there are things like that that skew it too [. . .] 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31

MF: when you have a decorated piece, particularly one with a background, like the cream background all over it and the- there are just more things that can go wrong with it at different stages (.) um, so for instance, um you know, especially bisque wasters, you’d be more (.) I would expect more bisque wasters AB: which we have found MF: of that, it wouldn’t mean they made more of that (.) it’s just that that has more likelihood of more things going wrong.

MF expressed skepticism about using waster dumps as indicators of what types of and how much pottery is made in a specific workshop (lines 1–3). She gives real-life examples of things that would affect the ratio of wasters to retail examples, because some types of pots are simply more likely not to survive the firing process, such as pots that are larger (line 17) or have wide openings (line 20). She also differentiates her practices from those of the colonial potters; she would be willing to throw pots into the waster pile because she experimented and then hated it (lines 5–6) or because she didn’t like the way a color turned out (lines 13–14). In some ways, MF sets herself up against archaeologists in terms of who is the real expert on potterymaking, implying that she would be better equipped to judge what can or cannot be gleaned from a waster dump. For example, MF specifically referenced an archaeological investigation in Yorktown, Virginia, one that involved excavating a waster dump where they found “a hundred of this certain shape, every one cracked in the bottom”. According to MF, the archaeologists were puzzled about why a colonial potter “would make that many pieces to try out a shape”; in other words, they wondered why a potter would take a chance that could (and in this case did) result in a great many identically flawed pieces. MF said that, although the archaeologists were surprised, she was not: MF: AB: MF:

they had big kilns and, you know, it’s not like today where I can think, well let me try two of these and put it in withright, put it in with another-like they just assumed it would be fine, um, so they made a quarter of a kiln-load and every one cracked in the same place, you know (.) and that made me realize that you have to go back and almost try and get in their mind and that (.) that was probably the first thing I read that made me think, ahh, I don’t know about that.

This is where the perspective of a potter is most valuable (and how ethnography can contribute to the archaeological study of ceramics), as a potter

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could offer new and perhaps unexpected information about the practical issues surrounding the production of pottery. In some ways, MF is herself an ethnographer, at least in terms of her inclination to ‘get in the mind’ of the colonial potters. Commenting on the Classifications of Others This same perspective also leads MF to comment on classifications made by other people and/or at other times. MF commented that there was a time, around 30 years ago, that “every single piece of decorated pottery that was obviously made in North Carolina; it was Moravian”, but that more recent, more nuanced views of life in Salem has made the picture more complex. MF explained: now it gets more complicated with apprentices and journeymen and potters from other areas (.) we have Weaver pottery in uh, Catawba County, who came directly from Pennsylvania, from Philadelphia, and it looks like Philadelphia pottery almost (.) you know, how many pieces of that were found somewhere that [was] not a kiln site and they said, well, I know it’s decorated, but this is Philadelphia pottery. Ceramics were being classified by decoration alone, which led to generalizations (e.g. all North Carolina pottery is Moravian; all pieces decorated a certain way are from Philadelphia). In the past few decades, however, more attention has been paid to movement, migration, and hybridization. MF concluded with a statement that echoes the words of both the Old Salem field director (FD) and Dr. F from the Missouri University Research Reactor (MURR), “the more we know, the more complex it gets”. She took down a book from her bookshelf and showed me a picture of two plates. Pointing to one of the plates, she described it as having been done by “somebody who never did a darn bit of decorating in their life before”: MF: AB: MF:

and they’re saying this is from around eighteen hundred (.) all they’re saying is Eastern Piedmont, you know right they know this [points to other plate in picture] is Alamance, but that’s not the same decorator as that [indicates first plate].

The book, one of dozens that she consults as she makes the North Carolina and Virginia reproductions, was appropriately vague about the attribution of the first plate she indicated. The colors, styles, and dates of the two plates were similar; one of them was simply executed in a way that MF judged as ‘skilled’, while the other was not. In another instance, MF addresses what she interpreted as a covered-over mistake. Following is her recounting of how that interpretation emerged:

Classification as Personal Interpretation MF:

AB: MF:

AB: MF:

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for instance, there was a sugar jar that went up for sale, not long ago, that was in Alamance County (.) probably from somewhere around 1800, maybe one side or the other (.) and I saw the photo of it online first, and it was marbled all over, you know, which would have been the first marbled sugar jar they found from that (.) which to a collector is a really rare thing, Yeah and the collector almost has more of a mentality of why did they decide to do (.) well I looked at the photo and I was pretty sure I saw a flower there (.) so I went to look at it in person and I am a hundred percent sure they started out doing a floral design and it dripped and they decided ah, just marble the whole thing (.) I would’ve been very surprised if the Moravian potters did that (.) right because they were more, they were just more organized and more (.) I don’t know, a little tightly controlled.

Her encounter with the piece began with an online auction guide, where photographic evidence suggested that what appeared to be a very early example of marbled glaze might actually have been a means of covering over a mistake. After seeing the photograph, she was “pretty sure” that was the case but then after seeing it in person, she was “a hundred percent sure”. In this particular case, as a person who does the same kind of decorating herself, she was able to see something that the collectors hadn’t seen. Notice, too, that this example is not just an appraisal of the decoration; she is also classifying the piece as not Moravian, saying, “I would’ve been very surprised if the Moravian potters did that”. The reason, according to MF, that this would have been surprising has to do with the schema surrounding Moravians and their pottery production (“more organized”, “tightly controlled”). A Schema of Moravians and Moravian Potters At several points during the interview, MF referenced the Teutonic tendency toward order and organization exhibited by (or imposed upon) the Moravians of Salem. Statements such as the foregoing and the comment that “the Moravians were very fussy with quality” point to a schema by which classifications are made. Moravians are characterized by MF (as well as collectors, and, to an extent, by archaeologists) as being “fastidious” and as perfectionists. Specific pieces of pottery (such as in the previous example) are classified as ‘not Moravian’ because they don’t conform to the (assumed) high standards set by Moravian potters. The schema provides an implicit context by which specific pieces of pottery are evaluated and classified. MF explained how the difference between herself and the Moravian potters might play out:

134 MF:

AB: MF:

Classification as Personal Interpretation and, um, you know, I think even when you’re really used to doing it, occasionally you might have the slip a little thick (.) or a little thin (.) and think (.) oh, I’ll try it anyway (.) no, they probably didn’t say that right but it’s not likely that they made a lot of absolute errors.

In her own pottery-making, if the slip she’s working with is a “little thick” or a “little thin”, she would “try it anyway”, and she presented this in contrast to colonial Moravian potters who she imagines would not be willing to do so. This particular excerpt also suggests another of MF’s working categories: the waster-creating, absolute error versus a smaller, perhaps disguisable, mistake. This again goes back to the context-dependent distinction of ‘second’ versus ‘waster’. MF’s life as a potter affects her judgments about the work of the Moravians. For example, MF told me about a couple of recent experiences in which ‘seconds’ that she had given to friends as gifts ended up on eBay: My really warped ones, I throw away (.) and I throw away more now than I did in the beginning because I’m seeing them on eBay (.) things I gave away for free to people who said, ‘I really like that’ and then they die and their kids putting them on eBay and that’s my reputation [. . .] I don’t want anybody ever putting my wares online again if I can help it (.) and they’ll put things like ‘quaintly charming potter, look how they didn’t mind that it warped and had sharp pieces on it’. Compare MF’s desire not to be viewed as “quaintly charming” with her view of Rudolph Christ’s attitude toward making what his inventories called “fine pottery”, which was modeled on ceramics produced in Staffordshire around the same time: I always wonder if there also was a marketing decision, particularly with Christ, that he didn’t want to put it out there and people think, “Oh, it’s a little bit like the British,” he wanted it perfect (.) because that’s a marketing thing, you know, ‘wow, look, it’s just like the British’ (.) so there might’ve been more seconds when he was experimenting. MF imagines that, like herself, Christ would not have been happy with pottery that negatively affected his reputation in the marketplace. This particular bit of conjecture reflects her concern about her own reputation— Christ’s decisions about what was and was not a ‘second’ would have been a “marketing decision” and would have been tied to his quest for ‘perfection’. All of these judgments are made within a context in which making a living as a potter comes into focus as the driving force behind the classifications that MF makes.

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Applying Potters’ Knowledge MF was keen to know what we had found at the Old Salem site, and I was happy to fill her in. I had, in fact, brought a couple of questions with me that the field director and I had come up with during one of our lunchtime lessons. When I told her that something that seemed to be a small structure had been found behind the main kiln, that at that time, the FD thought might be an add-on to the kiln: AB: MF: AB: MF:

[FD] thinks it was a big kiln and maybe they shortened it, or they added on to a kiln, or it was a separate small kilndid they share a chimney too? that’s- yeah? as long as it doesn’t fire at the same time, you can share a chimney, and have a damper at both ends.

I was surprised that sharing a chimney was an option, as was the FD when I relayed that information to him the next day. That may not be what the arrangement had been at the Christ kiln site, but it is the kind of information that is potentially useful for an archaeologist. The structures that I saw around MF’s pottery production area were helpful, too. The following was an exchange that took place near a large kiln that was under re-construction at the time: MF: AB: MF: AB: MF: AB: MF:

[pointing to a pile of burned cement bricks] those are bricks that came out of the salt kiln and they’re not really much good right, right so I’m not tripping on that too, ’cause this is all gonna have to go somewhere ’cause isn’t salt glaze really hard on bricks? Salt glaze is very hard on brick, and you tear your kiln down very often and just totally rebuild it well, that could explain the stuff that’s back behind. Huh. yeah, yeah, and particularly if they’re done with pottery and want to get rid of it.

The realization that I had as she was talking was that the vitrified brick we found behind the Christ kiln could be bricks that had outlived their usefulness, an arrangement that I also shared with the FD. All of these ideas, even if they don’t end up explaining anything about the Christ kiln site specifically, are valuable in terms of gaining a broader understanding of how pottery-making works. After showing me around her shop, workshop, and kilns, MF showed me her current waster dump (Figure 7.1), which included: •

A dozen or so small pieces (“you can tell that green glaze crawled on those (.) I don’t know why, I thought I washed them all fine)

136 • • • • •

Classification as Personal Interpretation A round, flat piece (“that big flat thing cracked in the final firing”) Legged cook pots (“some of these are pipkins, were in the bisque, one leg came off, it wasn’t attached as well as I thought”) A slip-glazed lip (“the lid just has a little chip on it”) A piece of Jugtown pottery (“I’ve had [that] for 25 years and it finally cracked cooking in it, so I brought it down”) A brown-glazed plate (“that upside-down plate there actually was fine; it’s one I’ve used for many years till finally it got chipped so much I brought it down here”)

All of these objects, some from other places, but most she had produced herself, had been classified as wasters. The collection of broken pieces in the pile was relevant to my understanding of what we were finding at the dig site in Old Salem, and I remarked to MF at the time, “that’s how other people’s pottery can end up in your waster dump”, to which she agreed, adding that “and it’s how something from Pennsylvania could end up in the waster pile of a potter in North Carolina who came from Pennsylvania, or someone who came from Europe, a piece that’s actually European could end up in there”. This kind of information can be usefully (albeit cautiously) applied to past circumstances.

Figure 7.1 MF’s waster dump

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A Personal Conclusion In re-reading the information about ethnography in this chapter and in Chapter 2 after the series of experiences I had in the field (i.e. in the classrooms, the labs, and at the dig site), it struck me that many comments seem to apply not only to archaeology but also to my experience as a linguist investigating language in the archaeological setting as well. One of the ideas that remained at the forefront of my thoughts throughout these experiences was Edgeworth’s observation about the “unfolding” relationship between the archaeologist and the material evidence (2003, p. vii). Certainly my understanding of archaeological practices evolved and unfolded over time. You are a geologist when wearing a hardhat, a scientist when using a microscope or wearing a radiation monitor, an archaeologist when running a trowel. When any of these things become part of a daily routine, therein lies the formation of a practice that then feeds in to the kinds of classifications you feel comfortable asserting and the set of terms you use most often in your interactions with your artifacts, your data. Lucas (2001) talks about fieldwork as an interpretive exercise (p. 3) and the fact that, while in the field, researchers interact with physical contexts, take fieldnotes, and get “fragmentary” impressions of what’s going on while they are collecting data. Later, in the lab or the office, the experience of the field is transformed into monographs and papers, the fragmentary is made coherent, and the raw materials are subjected to analysis and interpretation (p. 13).

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Archaeology is not so much a reading of the signs of the past, but a process in which these signs are written into the present. (Shanks & Tilley, 1987, p. 4)

Introduction Edgeworth (2003) explains that all sciences have a basic “root metaphor”, for example, Newtonian physics’ universe-as-machine metaphor, and archaeology is no exception. Edgeworth explains that, even after the influence of the textual turn in material culture studies waned, archaeology maintains a ‘material remains-as-record’ metaphor, which “ ‘covers over’ the act of discovery” as discussions revolve around artifacts as ‘manuscripts’, ‘texts’, ‘codes’, ‘testaments’, ‘palimpests’, or ‘translations’. From this perspective, artifacts are facts; they are observable evidence that is “construed as facts about the unobservable past” (2003, p. 1). But we know that artifacts are not facts, and the sense of an artifact as something fashioned or used by humans perseveres from the past into the present, and when an artifact is classified and labeled, it is being re-fashioned yet again. Archaeologists of different academic backgrounds will undertake this refashioning differently, depending on the assumptions, questions, and tools that the researcher brings to bear on the artifact. Moreover, classification, as a means of re-fashioning, is a discursive practice that involves the interaction of artifacts, people, histories, knowledges, and contexts. Ellen (1979) states, “all classifications are discursive practices situated in a given social matrix and general configuration of knowledge and ideas” (p. 17). In the preceding chapters, we have seen how knowledge is configured differently by different types of archaeology and we have seen that no point along the humanistic-to-scientific spectrum has a monopoly on ‘truth’; all of the methods discussed here are creative and interpretive processes. Daniel Miller, in writing on artifact variability in rural Malwa, states that, “material culture sets reflect the organization principles of human categorization processes” (1982a, p. 17). He also writes that “categorization processes mediate and organize the social construction of reality” (1982a, p. 23). This applies, of

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course, not only to the people who are the focus of archaeological inquiry but also to the archaeologists themselves.

Multiple Narratives At the outset of this investigation, Dr. M gave me three large potsherds from an “unknown site in the [Mississippi] Delta” that had been donated to the Cottonlandia Museum in the 1960s and later donated to our university in 2015 (Figure 8.1). I labeled them Cottonlandia 001, 002, and 003. What follows is a wildly speculative imagining of how the three specimens could be interpreted from the perspectives of a typologist, a petrographer using TSP, and a archaeochemist using INAA. Instead of focusing on whether my interpretations are accurate, I beg the reader to instead focus on the narrative(s) that each type of analysis could present. The prehistoric Cottonlandia specimens can be characterized generally as ‘crappy pottery’ and described as thick, hand-built, unfinished, and

Figure 8.1 The Cottonlandia sherds

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undecorated. All three are slightly curvilinear, which suggests that they are body sherds from large, rounded vessels. The three sherds appear to be of similar compositions, though the outside of sherd (002) looks like it has been smoothed and darkened (possibly by fire). A side view of sherd 003 reveals that it is composed of a porous clay matrix with shell inclusions (Figure 8.2). Of interest to the quantitative typologist would be similarities and differences between sherds from a single assemblage. A sherd that seems very different from the rest might be interpreted as being imported from somewhere else. A sherd that appears similar compositionally, but ‘fancier’ in terms of decoration than the others in an assemblage (i.e. one that is cord-marked, painted, or incised), might be interpreted as having a different social meaning than sherds that are undecorated. With quantitative typology, the classificatory meaning of a potsherd is what arises from the context of the assemblage and, given the context of these sherds, 002 might be judged as having some special social significance because it shows signs of having been smoothed on the outside.

Figure 8.2 Side view of Cottonlandia 003

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The Cottonlandia pottery sherds traveled with me to the University College London (UCL) petrography course, where Prof. Q used them to demonstrate the preparation of thin-section slides. The final product was a set of three Cottonlandia thin sections (Figure 8.3, left). Figure 8.3 (right) features a glimpse down the scope of one of the Cottonlandia thin sections, in which you can see grog inclusions and the hint of a rotation in the clay fabric that suggests the vessel was built by coiling. My Cottonlandia thin sections looked nothing like the examples we had viewed in the course of the petrography class, though we had looked at North American sherds in thin-section that were from California. The Cottonlandia sherds were lacking in quartz, which was abundant in most of the thin sections we encountered. The sherds that I brought with me also contained a great deal of shell as temper and evidenced a heavy presence of voids as a result of burned-out organic material that had also been used as temper. A brief summary of the notes I took on each Cottonlandia thin section is included (for posterity) in Table 8.1. Not

Figure 8.3 Cottonlandia thin-section slides (left) and a view of 001 down the scope (right) Table 8.1 Observations Made of the Cottonlandia Slides Under a Light-Polarizing Microscope Cottonlandia 001

Cottonlandia 002

Cottonlandia 003

Grog (maybe even grog within grog) Residual coils

Grog, shell

Large voids where plant material burned out Micaceous clay matrix with small flecks of quartz Clay mixing or ironstaining would account for differences in color

Little quartz, lots of shell Some feldspar

Voids where plant material burned out One piece of grog has minerals with high interference colors

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much else can be done with this information except to say the Cottonlandia samples could be grouped together as a fabric and labeled ‘grog-tempered micaceous clay’. My notes do indicate, though, some slight differences. The grog used as temper (present in 001 and 002) could be important, especially as one of the large inclusions found in the 001 thin section appears to be an example of grog within grog (Figure 8.4), something that implies a social practice (either one rooted in practicality or one rooted in ritual) of using crushed pottery as temper. In addition, two of the thin sections had large voids where organic material used as temper had burned away (002 and 003) and two also had shell used as temper (001 and 002). Though they all appear to be of the same general fabric group, perhaps any differences could be explained as being the work of different potters who had their own preferences for tempering their clay. This is very much supposition and, in an actual archaeological study, one would first try to extrapolate the kind(s) of rocks and minerals that make up the pottery inclusions and match those with geological samples to determine where the rocks came from and perhaps how far they had traveled. For the archaeologist who uses INAA, the Cottonlandia samples would be viewed as the sum and combination of their elemental parts. For the Cottonlandia samples, INAA results would (in theory) have been similar to those provided by a portable X-ray fluorescence device (Figure 8.5). (Instead of sending samples to MURR and creating unnecessary radioactive materials, I used a handheld PXRF while at UCL; do note that there is the potential for wildly differing results between INAA and PXRF, depending on how accurately the PXRF is calibrated.) Again, by themselves, these results mean

Figure 8.4 A large piece of grog in thin section 001, perhaps grog within grog

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Figure 8.5 Cottonlandia sherds’ PXRF results

little. The one thing that does stand out is that one of the samples, 003, is not like the other two given the presence of potassium (K) in 001 and 002 (but not 003), and the absence of sulfur (S) in 001 and 002 (though not in 003). If these three samples were representative of a larger set, one could imagine using sulfur and potassium to create a bivariate plot for grouping, which would result in samples similar to 001 and 002 being pulled out into one group and samples similar to 003 being pulled out as another. Lucas (2001) explains that classifications may not be ‘natural’ or completely ‘objective’; instead they have emerged over time and have “developed out of specific historical and theoretical circumstances” (p. 64). What we see with the Cottonlandia sherds are three (hypothetical) analytical classifications that tell three different stories, which are drawn from specific historical and theoretical backgrounds. Typological and petrographical analyses suggest that the three are of the same fabric group, though slight differences in finishing (as observed in the hand specimen) and tempering (as observed through TSP) point to different means of achieving social meaning. The elemental analysis suggests that one of the sherds (003) may not, in fact, belong to the same group as the other two. Even though they are asking similar questions (about origins, movement, social behavior), different means of analysis not only achieve their interpretations in different ways, but also the stories they produce in the end might be very different. Archaeologists are able to interpret the same artifacts (if not the same data) as telling a different story. In some ways, material artifacts are the raw material for the creation of narrative. Let’s now turn to the questions posed at the outset of this investigation: What are we doing when we group things? What are we doing when we name things? What is the relationship between practice and classification? And, finally, what does it mean to say that archaeological artifacts are discursive objects?

What Are We Doing When We Group Things? Grouping is carrying out a practice; in the case of archaeological classification of ceramics, creating groups is a means of measuring past behavior, of offering both counterpoint to and corroboration for historical documents, and/or of indexing social movement. The creation of categories is a “twoway transaction” between an individual researcher’s prior knowledge and

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the artifact (Edgeworth, 2006, p. 3). This transaction is the focus of a larger interaction, fueled by different modes of meaning-making, such as language, gesture, and objects. Categories/groups—and the social meaning ascribed to them—are not real in the sense that they exist outside of human creation, but are instead reflective of cognitive models affected by context. Categories are the result of “contextualized interpretation” (Croft & Cruse, 2004, p. 99), and that context expands beyond the physical to include the knowledge and training of researchers who engage in particular kinds of, in this case, archaeological practice.

What Are We Doing When We Name Things? One answer to the question ‘what are we doing when we name things?’ harkens back to the Whorfian idea that labels are a way of imposing order on an unordered world. Material culturalist Jule David Prown (1982) uses linguistic theory as an example of the fundamental “quest for cultural belief systems” (p. 6) that he sees as the goal of his own discipline. Prown writes: Modern linguistic theory has made us aware of the significance of language as the manifestation of man’s capacity, indeed compulsion, to impose structure on the world and his experience of it. Man’s structuring, apparent in language, is the only reality he knows, his reality is relative, endlessly changing, true only for the moment; it is the empirical shadow of a hypothetical underlying permanent universe, a world of ideas, a unified field. The reality man experiences is created by man, and language, the naming of that reality, is a manifestation and measure of the current structure of reality in any given place and time . . . there is a language of form as there is a language of words; a naming through making as there is a naming through saying, that man expresses his human need to structure his world through forms as well as through language is a basic premise of the structuralist approach to material culture. (1982, p. 6) The idea Prown expresses, that there is a ‘language of form’ as well as a ‘language of words’ and that ‘making’ is another type of ‘naming’ binds the fields of the physical and linguistic together. And so Prown wishes for material culture the same type of examination—and the same types of underlying assumptions—as we find in the study of language. For Prown, the study of material things is a kind of semiotics, which takes as its basis the idea that “artifacts transmit signals which elucidate mental patterns of structures” and that “artifacts, then, can yield evidence of the patterns of the society that fabricated them, of our society as we interpret our responses (and nonresponses) and of any other society intervening in time or removed in space for which there are recorded responses” (1982, p. 6).

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Reality and our experience of it is created through the language we use to describe it. Archaeologists, as scientists, have “access to far more universal, less context-bound categories” though often, instead of using the disciplinespecific terms available to them, these speakers choose to use categories “attuned” to a particular setting (Goodwin, 1997, p. 124). Giving categories a label, either by choosing to use already existing names or by creating new ones, is part of engaging in a practice that is tied to the field of archaeology broadly as well as to their own, more narrow specialty. With group-creation and naming, archaeologists are in this way engaging in a practice that is both ‘global’ and ‘local’. At both levels, names give categories social meaning (even if the ones giving the names are trying to avoid just that). The MURR archaeologists use numbers instead of existing labels as a way of enacting their system of beliefs about data, about multivariate statistics, and about the durability of knowledge. Because of their technology and because of the increase in the amount of data they are able to analyze, their understanding of what holds samples together as a group differs from that of other archaeologists. Their avoidance of previously used classifications stems from a desire not to impose “social meaning”, though their use of numbers as group labels imparts a different kind of social meaning. As Gell (1998) relates, there is no such thing as an object that is “classificatory and context-free” (p. 22). Sometimes historical context is key to understanding the complexity of a present-day label. In historical archaeology, terms that refer to already established categories (e.g. creamware, pearlware, stoneware, “jackfieldlike”) link the potsherds on hand to artifacts or specimens that have already been labeled, providing continuity and (perhaps) confluence with historical documents. Even though they are somewhat codified, these labels do not necessarily affix the sherds to a specific designation in terms of where or who produced them, but can instead offer a way to talk about what appears to be conflicting evidence. The potter Rudolph Christ, for example, was not known to have made jackfield pottery, but several pieces recovered from kiln sites associated with Christ were deemed “jackfield-like” in that they had a brown-black glaze similar to British pieces made by Thomas Whieldon labeled as “jackfield”. The potter, MF, asked the pertinent question, “Are we seeing it and not attributing it to the Moravians?” Being in the field also offers opportunities for an excavation to develop its own referential practices, such as using the term “pinky-up ware” as an on-the-spot designation for what appeared to be a sherd from a teacup. Contrast that with Dr. M’s use of the term “crappy pottery” for sherds that were undecorated, thick, and perhaps pieced together by adding on to an existing vessel. Experts don’t just provide “different forms of knowledge” about an object; they “literalize different kinds of material objects” (Jones & Yarrow, 2013, p. 5, emphasis added). Language brings artifact into being as socially meaningful objects.

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What’s the Relationship Between Practice and Classification? “Practice is about meaning as an experience of everyday life”, and that meaning is negotiated and re-negotiated continually throughout our social interactions (Wenger, 1998, p. 52). Categories are the ideas that emerge through the interaction of knowledge (gained through training and experience) with specific material objects (artifacts), their physical and historical context (documents, previous archaeological finds, other people), and the questions you want to answer. Goodwin (1994) discusses “professional vision”, which he explains as the ‘seeing’ of relevant details that becomes part of what identifies a community of practitioners. In reference to using a Munsell color chart, for example, Goodwin describes the “encounter between a coding scheme and the world [which] is a key locus for scientific practice, the place where the multifaceted complexity of ‘nature’ is transformed into the phenomenal categories that make up the work environment of a scientific discipline. It is precisely here that nature is transformed into culture” (1994, p. 608). Each of the practices described in these chapters transforms artifacts into culture in different ways and on two levels. Artifacts are first transformed into data as per archaeological practice, perhaps undergoing physical changes in the process. And then, the artifactual data are transformed into something with social/cultural significance. Whatever the tools used to augment the professional vision, the different tools lead to different classifications and different interpretations. Those who study the behavior of past peoples through objects have a particular challenge because there is no knowable ‘true’ answer, and one must accept that the interpretations of the past are multivocal and fluid. Another multi-layered understanding of ‘practice’ that presents itself here has to do with the fact that the study of artifacts represents the product of a community of practice (the artifact) being studies by the product of a community of practice (the trained archaeologist). The preceding chapters demonstrated the ways in which archaeologists are trained: in classrooms via explicit instruction on how to do things that then also passes on the methods, assumptions, and attitudes of the teacher (which are often modified versions of what they were taught to do). Discipline-specific vocabulary and the ways it can be used are part of what is passed on. Duranti (2009) states that “many anthropologists still take language for granted as if it were a transparent medium for culture” (2009, p. 5), but I hope that I have demonstrated that it is through and with language that archaeological classifications are imbued with social meaning.

Discursive Objects According to Goodwin (2006), all artifacts are “discursive objects” (p. 45). How can we apply the concept of the “discursive object” to the situation

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discussed in this book? First of all, every artifact undergoes transformations (physical, figurative, etc.) at the hands of those who find them. Petrography and INAA radically transform artifacts in order to study them. In every case, the artifact ‘becomes’ something else as the result of interaction with the person that is assessing it. We change them, but they also change us. Yarrow (2003) addresses “the ways in which the things that people excavate combine with and alter the thoughts and actions of the archaeologist excavating them” (p. 66), implying that, in the field, it’s difficult to separate the interpretation from the thing being described. Edgeworth (2003) goes so far as to suggest that material evidence becomes “raw material” again; specifically, artifacts are raw material with producers (archaeologists) and a process (excavation) that are “made, wrought, constructed, manufactured, shaped, worked, honed, and fashioned” into facts (p. 7). It is the discovery/ creation of such facts that makes someone an archaeologist, and language is the medium for such a construction. More than a “postcard from the field”, language in an archaeological setting that is used to create, assign, negotiate, and reaffirm categories (Tedlock, 1983, p. XX) that define the practice and those who participate in it.

Final Thoughts on Language and Classification Hicks and Beaudry (2010) remark on the categories that we make and use, suggesting that we imagine categories to “represent a world, which we can hold at arm’s length” even though we are always in the process of “enacting our knowledge of things” (2010, p. 21). They recommend celebrating this enaction instead of shying away from it or pretending that we’re being objective. In that spirit, I fully admit that although I have suggested some answers to my questions, the experiences I had over the course of this investigation have shown me that my initial questions were far too simplistic and my own attempt to draw a line among language, artifact, and interaction is a holdover from my training and reflective of my wish to classify elements of what I have seen and learned. The language that archaeologists use is part of the practice that creates, reflects, and mediates experience of and with artifacts. Terms from the study of ceramics are employed in archaeological investigations of pottery in different ways, ranging from the microscopic to the macroscopic. For instance, Dr. M used the terms ‘clay’ and ‘matrix’ almost interchangeably to describe the main substance of the potsherds that she examines. The FD used the terms to refer to the make-up of excavation units, calling the dirt present in each of the layers of excavation the ‘matrix’, and using the term ‘inclusion’ for excavation content. Prof. Q applied all of these terms to what he saw under the microscope, applying the terms ‘clay’, ‘matrix’, and ‘inclusion’ to the thin sections mounted on glass slides. The language of archaeologists who use INAA, of course, can be characterized by an absence of these terms because their elemental analysis has no way of distinguishing between

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elements that were from the clay matrix versus elements that make up mineral and rock inclusions. The same terms can be applied in different, related circumstances to signify different, related things, though in each case the vocabulary being used is one that enacts ‘archaeology’ and calls to mind a schema in which there is a binding ingredient (matrix) that contains removable objects (inclusions). Language is fluid, but what about classification? The preceding chapters have presented a number of possibilities for dealing with categories/ groups and what (if anything) they represent. The ‘textbook’ approach is that groups are real (i.e. they exist in objective reality), but categories and classes are constructs (Rice, 2015, p. 225). The historical archaeologist might view groups as historical realities, subject to amendment as we try to line up historical labels in accordance with new and changing understandings. In a way, this aligns well with Dr. F’s view of classification: Groups are ideas and it is our labels that give them social meaning (see Chapter 6). Finally, we see that classifications are the enactment of schemas, bundles of beliefs, knowledges, and attitudes. What lessons, then, does the archaeological classification of ceramics hold for sociolinguists? Consider the following statements: •

“All observation is also interpretation” (Edgeworth, 2003, p. 10)

•

Identifications are “contingent” on what we think we see (Holtorf, 2002, p. 55)

•

Classification is “momentary, fluid, and flexible” (Hodder, 1997, p. 691)

What if all of these statements apply equally well to the study of language? What if, in the application of labels to dialects, varieties, and languages, we are offering not an assessment of objective reality, but our own historied and contingent interpretations? Further, what if our habitual labels of ‘language and society’ or ‘language and culture’ are themselves representative of the same kinds of contingencies? Edgeworth (2006) in his advocacy of the ethnography of archaeology, suggests that researchers “re-encounter” their object of study, travel across disciplinary boundaries, in order to work within “liminal spaces of great creative potential” (p. 15). The threshold between language and (material) culture is becoming less clear. The next set of driving questions (which undoubtedly will also turn out to be too simplistic) centers on finding the links between the study of language and the study of (other) products of human cultural processes. How do physical objects enter into the discursive practices of identity- and meaning-making? What would a re-encountering of linguistic study entail? Should we treat language as being different from other aspects of culture?

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In the end, I suspect that there are likely to be few answers, just more questions. Tilley (1989) writes that “the number of pieces of information we collect about the past may increase incrementally—our understanding does not” (p. 277). Indeed, this is the same adage we have encountered throughout these chapters, time and again: ‘the more you know, the less you understand’.

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Index

ad hoc categories 17, 44 Alamance County pottery 89, 92, 132–133 Algonquian pottery 38–39 amphora 24, 25 apprentices 89, 96, 132 archaeometry 8, 9 Aristotle 12, 18 Arnold, Dean 40–41 art-historical era 25 assemblage 31, 40, 48, 69, 106, 107, 108, 110, 140 attributes 3, 14, 17–18, 28, 34–35, 37, 40, 49, 50, 63, 70, 73, 74, 76, 80, 92, 99, 109 Aufseher Collegium 82, 85 Aust, Gottfried 85, 89 Beaudry, Mary 48–49 Bethabara 82, 83 Binford, Lewis 4 bivariate plot 102, 117, 118, 119, 120, 143 Bivens, John 83, 84, 85 Bourdieu, Pierre 5, 20 calabash 55, 56 chaine operatoire 87, 108, 109 Chesapeake pottery 48–49 Chilton, Elizabeth 38–39 Chomsky, Noam 19 Christ, Rudolph 79, 84, 85, 89, 96–97, 134–135, 145 Christ kiln 82–83, 85, 87, 135 clay, definition of 6, 7 cluster analysis 33, 42, 109, 118 cognitive models 15, 17, 18, 144 colonial pottery 49, 81, 127–128 Colonial Williamsburg 127

community of practice (CoP) 59, 60, 146 correlate matrix 68 Cottonlandia sherds 139–143 creamware 81, 85, 93, 96, 145 criteria of abundance 104 cross polar light (XP) 102, 103, 105, 112, 113 cup versus mug 15–16 decoration, definition of 7 delft pottery 81 discrete versus continuous assemblages 30–31 discursive objects 22, 23, 143, 146–147 documentary evidence 48, 95 Dragendorff, Hermann 25 Dressel, Heinrich 25 Duckfoot pottery 124, 123 dynamic construal approach 18 earthenware 81, 84, 106 Edgeworth, Matthew 20–21, 23, 137, 138 Egyptian pottery 25–26, 69 emic versus etic 8, 49–51, 71, 127 estimation of vessel representation (EVREP) 36 ethnoarchaeology 4–5, 8, 24, 40–41, 53 ethnographic analogy 4 ethnography 20–22, 39, 126, 127, 131–132, 137, 148 ethnomethodology 5, 40–41, 42, 53, 54 ethnotaxonomy 40, 41–48 fabric, pottery 6, 101, 102, 105, 107–108, 109, 110–111, 112, 113, 115, 141, 142, 143 faience 81, 91 family resemblance 13

160

Index

Ford, James 8, 28–29, 37, 69 Ford-Spaulding debate 29 frames 17, 19, 52 functionalism 87 fuzzy categories 30, 31, 42, 52

Moravians 82–83, 85, 87, 128, 133–134, 145 multivariate analysis 42, 101–102, 109, 117, 119–120, 122, 145 Munsell chart 22, 30, 58, 64, 79, 146

gestalt 17, 18 Gibble, Patricia 49, 50 glaze 7, 9, 29, 30, 70, 81, 84, 86, 88, 89, 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 98, 129, 133, 135, 136 Goodwin, Charles 19, 21–22, 58, 62, 64, 79, 146 Greek pottery 24 grit 75, 76, 77 grog 7, 75, 76, 77, 111, 113, 115, 141, 142

neutron activation analysis (NAA) see instrumental neutron activation analysis

habitus 20 historical archaeology 48–49, 50, 79–80, 81, 83, 85, 95, 97, 99, 145, 148 Hodder, Ian 5, 21, 31–32, 80, 88, 91, 99 Holtorf, Cornelius 21 Ilchamus 55, 56 inclusions 7, 29, 51, 54, 55, 56 instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) 9, 24, 51, 61, 109, 116–117 interpretive archaeology 5 ironstone 81 Iroquoian pottery 38–39 jackfield pottery 81, 89–91, 145 jackware 90; see also jackfield pottery journeymen 84, 96, 97, 132 Kempton, Willet 42–48 Krause, Richard 39–40 Labov, William 10, 15–16, 130 Linnaean taxonomy 9–10 Longacre, William 53, 54, 55, 56 lumpers versus splitters 61, 107 majolica pottery 81 materiality 6, 21, 100 Mesoamerican pottery 120 metaphor 138 Miller, Daniel 18–19, 52 mineralogy 100, 101, 104, 105 Mississippian period 60, 69–70, 73, 77 Missouri University Research Reactor (MURR) 116, 117, 118, 120, 121, 123, 125

Old Salem 127, 132, 135, 136 Olmec pottery 120–121 outliers 109, 120 paleontology 72 pearlware 30, 81, 93, 96, 145 Pennycook, Alistair 20 Petrie, William Matthew Flinders 25–26, 27, 69 petrographic fabric 107–108, 110–111 petrography 8, 23, 24, 51, 52, 55, 56, 61, 100–105, 111, 120, 139, 141, 143 pipkin 50, 129, 136 plane polarized light (PPL) 102, 103, 105, 112, 113 polarizing microscope 8, 51, 100, 103 porcelain 81, 84, 89, 93, 94 portable X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (PXRF) 142–143 postprocessual 5, 38, 86, 87 Potomac Typological System (POTS) 48–49 prehistoric pottery 59, 67, 70, 99, 101, 104, 106, 111, 118, 127, 139 principle component analysis 32–33, 109 processual archaeology 4–5, 87 prototype theory 14–15, 17, 42 provenance 51, 100, 104, 111 Prown, Jules David 144 Puebla pottery 42 quantitative typology 53, 56, 61, 71–73, 76 Quinn, Patrick 53, 55, 56 reproductions 127, 128 Roman pottery 25 Rosch, Eleanor 13–15, 42 sagger 94, 98, 99 schema 17, 30, 133–134, 148 schnitting 88 Seagrove, NC 127 seriation chart 8, 23, 28, 69

Index Shepard, Anna 37, 53, 54–56 Sinopoli, Carla 30, 31, 53, 55, 56 slip 7, 29, 84, 91, 92, 134, 136 sociolinguistics 2, 20, 148 South, Stanley 83, 84–85, 89, 129 South Carolina Institute of Archaeology and Anthropology (SCIAA) 59–60, 78 Staffordshire pottery 81 Steponaitis, Vincas 53, 55, 56 stoneware 81, 84, 94, 98–99, 145 taxonomy 9–11 temper 6–7, 8, 9, 29, 37, 56, 62, 64, 68, 70, 73, 75, 76, 77, 106, 108, 109, 111, 113, 115, 121, 127, 141, 142, 143 thin section petrography (TSP) 51, 53, 56, 70, 100 tin glazed pottery 81 type-variety classification 29–30, 37, 70 University College London (UCL) 141, 142

161

van der Leeuw, Sander Ernst 52–53, 126, 127 variation in pottery 5, 25, 28, 30, 32, 33, 37, 38, 68, 71, 87, 127 voids 7, 100, 106, 107, 141, 142 ware 29, 30, 37, 49, 81, 84, 111 waster dump 89, 128, 130–131, 135–136 wasters 88, 128, 131, 135–136 Wedgwood china 81 Whallon, Robert 32–35 whiteware 81, 93, 94 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 12–13, 20, 144 Wilson, Edward O. 1–2 Wittgenstein, Ludwig 13 Wren, Christopher 53, 54, 55, 56 X-ray diffraction (XRD) 61 X-ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) 61 yellow-ware 81