Pottery In The Archaeological Record

A rich portrayal of how Romans used their pottery and the implications of these practices on the archaeological record, considering an array of evidence including Latin and ancient Greek texts and representations in Roman art. It will appeal to specialists and academics interested in archaeology, Roman pottery and ceramics.

Archaeologist are increasingly focusing on the transformation of artifacts from their use in the past to their appearance in the archaeological record, trying to identiy the natural and cultural processes that created the archaeological record we study today. In Classical Archaeology, attention to these processes received an impetus by J. Theodore Pena's 2007 monograph, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record, which considered how ceramic vessels were made, used and stayed in use serving various secondary purposes, before finally being discarded. Pena relied mainly on evidence from Roman Italy, which raises the question of the impact of similar cultural forces on pottery from other periods and places. His work accentuates the need to continue the process of building and developing explicit interpretive models of ceramic life-histories in Mediterranean archeology. With a view to beginning to address these challenges, the editors invited a group of specialists in the pottery of Greece and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean to a colloquium in Athens in June 2008, asking the contributors to recondiser Pena's general models, approaches and examples from their own particular geographic and cultural perspectives. This publication constitutes the proceedings of this colloquium.

A 'state of the art' guide to pottery analysis providing information on recent scientific developments and the latest statistical techniques.

This is an up-to-date account of the different kinds of information that can be obtained through the archaeological study of pottery.

This volume emphasizes the complex interactions between ceramic containers and people in past and present contexts. Pottery, once it appears in the archaeological record, is one of the most routinely recovered artifacts. It is made frequently, broken often, and comes in endless varieties according to economic and social requirements. Moreover, even in shreds ceramics can last almost forever, providing important clues about past human behavior. The contributors to this volume, all leaders in ceramic research, probe the relationship between humans and ceramics. Here they offer new discoveries obtained through traditional lines of inquiry, demonstrate methodological breakthroughs, and expose innovative new areas for research. Among the topics covered in this volume are the age at which children begin learning pottery making; the origins of pottery in the Southwest U.S., Mesoamerica, and Greece; vessel production and standardization; vessel size and food consumption patterns; the relationship between pottery style and meaning; and the role pottery and other material culture plays in communication. Pottery and People provides a cross-section of the state of the art, emphasizing the complete interactions between ceramic containers and people in past and present contexts. This is a milestone volume useful to anyone interested in the connections between pots and people.

Archaeologist are increasingly focusing on the transformation of artifacts from their use in the past to their appearance in the archaeological record, trying to identiy the natural and cultural processes that created the archaeological record we study today. In Classical Archaeology, attention to these processes received an impetus by J. Theodore Pena's 2007 monograph, Roman Pottery in the Archaeological Record, which considered how ceramic vessels were made, used and stayed in use serving various secondary purposes, before finally being discarded. Pena relied mainly on evidence from Roman Italy, which raises the question of the impact of similar cultural forces on pottery from other periods and places. His work accentuates the need to continue the process of building and developing explicit interpretive models of ceramic life-histories in Mediterranean archeology. With a view to beginning to address these challenges, the editors invited a group of specialists in the pottery of Greece and the rest of the Eastern Mediterranean to a colloquium in Athens in June 2008, asking the contributors to recondiser Pena's general models, approaches and examples from their own particular geographic and cultural perspectives. This publication constitutes the proceedings of this colloquium.

The 23 papers presented here are the product of the interdisciplinary exchange of ideas and approaches to the study of kitchen pottery between archaeologists, material scientists, historians and ethnoarchaeologists. They aim to set a vital but long-neglected category of evidence in its wider social, political and economic contexts. Structured around main themes concerning technical aspects of pottery production; cooking as socioeconomic practice; and changing tastes, culinary identities and cross-cultural encounters, a range of social economic and technological models are discussed on the basis of insights gained from the study of kitchen pottery production, use and evolution. Much discussion and work in the last decade has focussed on technical and social aspects of coarse ware and in particular kitchen ware. The chapters in this volume contribute to this debate, moving kitchen pottery beyond the Binfordian ‘technomic’ category and embracing a wider view, linking processualism, ceramic-ecology, behavioral schools, and ethnoarchaeology to research on historical developments and cultural transformations covering a broad geographical area of the Mediterranean region and spanning a long chronological sequence.

Pottery is the most ubiquitous find in most historical archaeological excavations and serves as the basis for much research in the discipline. But it is not only its frequency that makes it a prime dataset for such research, it is also that pottery embeds many dimensions of the human experience, ranging from the purely technical to the eminently symbolic. The aim of this book is to provide a cutting-edge theoretical and methodological framework, as well as a practical guide, for archaeologists, students and researchers to study ceramic assemblages. As opposed to the conventional typological approach, which focuses on vessel shape and assumed function with the main goal of establishing a chronological sequence, the proposed framework is based on the technological approach. Such an approach utilizes the concept of chaîne opératoire, which is geared to an anthropological interpretation of archaeological objects. The author offers a sound theoretical background accompanied by an original research strategy whose presentation is at the heart of this book. This research strategy is presented in successive chapters that are geared to explain not only how to study archaeological assemblages, but also why the proposed methods are essential for achieving ambitious interpretive goals. In the heated debate on the equation stating that “pots equal people”, which is a rather fuzzy reference to assumed relationships between (mostly) ethnic groups and pottery, technology enables us to propose with conviction the equation “pots equal potters”. In this way, a well-founded history of potters is able to achieve a much better cultural and anthropological understanding of ancient societies.​