Related Papers
Insight from Innovation: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics
Emilie Sibbesson
The Cambridge Companion to Historical Archaeology
Ceramic studies in historical archaeology
2006 •
Teresita Majewski
Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process after 25 Years
2011 •
Dean E Arnold
This article from the ‘Classics Review’ section of the journal ‘ethnoarchaeology’ provides the back story and update for “Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process” published in 1985 and reprinted many times since then. That book built on the seminal article that I wrote for ‘Current Anthropology’ ten years earlier, and my responses to my critics there that stimulated me to write the book (those articles are on this site). Besides several anecdotes about the book, one section of the article provides a brief ethnography of its publication at the Cambridge University Press. One of my greatest frustrations that stimulated writing of the book was that my former focus on the cognitive anthropology (e. g. Arnold 1971) of ceramic production and my focus on what has come to be known as ‘technological choice’ among potters failed to provide much insight into understanding ceramic production outside of the ceramics in the communities that I studied. Those theoretical and conceptual perspectives, although helpful and useful, did not help me provide insight into another pottery making community except that ‘potters make choices’ about resources, vessel shapes, and design. I already knew that from my field work; it was very obvious to me. I had written several articles that incorporated potters’ choices that I called ‘decision trees’. (These articles will be added to this site in due time), and the frustration of the incomparability of my perspective from one pottery making community to another that led me to rethink my experiences with potters in Mexico, Peru and Guatemala, in order to discover new insights that were truly cross-cultural in scope. The results were generalizations, but not necessarily universals, in ’Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process’. Some of these generalizations challenged assumptions and generalizations that archaeologists used to interpret the past. Finally, the article makes several updates to the ceramic resource model, and other feedback mechanisms in the book.
Book Review: Emilie Sibbesson, Ben Jervis and Sarah Coxon, eds. Insight from Innovation: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics. Papers Presented in Honour of Professor David Peaco*ck’s Contributions to Archaeological Ceramic Studies.2016
Maja Gori
Emilie Sibbesson, Ben Jervis and Sarah Coxon, eds. Insight from Innovation: New Light on Archaeological Ceramics. Papers Presented in Honour of Professor David Peaco*ck’s Contributions to Archaeological Ceramic Studies. (Southampton Monographs in Archaeology, New Series 6. St. Andrews: The Highfield Press, 2016, xxxvi and 277pp., 85 colour and b/w illustr., 13 tables, ISBN: 978-0-9926336-4-6)
Journal of Archaeological Research
Current issues in ceramic ethnoarchaeology
2003 •
Miriam Stark
The Dawn of Ceramics
Mihael Budja
The paper discusses the ceramic technologies and social practices in hunter-gatherer and farmer communities in Eurasia. Ceramic technology had become the agency of hunter-gatherers long before food production was developed and farming villages appeared. Fired clay was a medium for artefact manufacture and manipulation in the sense of active interference in human life that clearly depended upon the capability of transmitting or having access to this know-how, which obviously predates the transition to farming. Ceramics were embedded in hunter-gatherers’ trajectories and social networks and represent as well as a continuum of traditions, symbolic systems and beliefs.
Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 7:129-137
2000 Advances in Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology.
2000 •
Michelle Hegmon
ARCHAEOLOGICAL CERAMICS CONSERVATION AND RESTORATION
cristina scarlatescu
Abstract: Archaeological ceramics raises a series of problems concerning the conservation and restoration interventions. Due to the conditions the pieces are placed in until their discovery, certain interventions, meant to reinstate their integrity, are required, both for restoring the materials structure and for the reconstruction of the vessel itself.
Continuous Encounters: Ceramics in Art and Archaeology, Hecht Museum, exhibition catalogue, English version, 2016
Adi Erlich
The English version of a paper from an exhibition catalogue on ceramics in art and archaeology, Hecht Museum, University of Haifa,, June 2016. The paper presents pottery in antiquity and how it is used by archaeologists.
B.A.R International Series 2193, Oxford, Archaeopress, p. 80-88.
Anthropological interpretation of ceramic assemblages: foundations and implementations of technological analysis.
2011 •
Roux Valentine
Technological ceramic analysis aims to studying the synchronic and diachronic variability of archaeological assemblages from an anthropological angle. It has its bases in actualist studies (anthropology and ethno-archaeology). After a reminded of the principal results obtained in the last decades, methodological results are extracted that are applicable to archaeological assemblages; from these a classification procedure is proposed. The latter, based on the chaîne opératoire concept, allows a controlled image of the various traditions that make up a ceramic assemblage; given that a tradition corresponds to a social entity which can vary in sociological nature and include several production units. On a diachronic level it enable stables features to be distinguished from those that evolve through time, thereby witnessing to endogenous and/or exogenous evolutionary phenomena. In this way technological ceramic analysis can lay the foundations of many-faceted interpretations, the study of technical traditions being the first stage for subsequently analysing the organisation and distribution of ceramic production, the function of the sites, and, lastly, the ways in which technical and stylistic characteristics evolve.
