Carol Kramer

Ceramics, caste, and kin: Spatial relations in Rajasthan, India

Abstract Ethnoarchaeological research in two cities in Rajasthan, India, investigated relationships between social organization and ceramic distribution. Using a ranking system to evaluate kinship distance and digitized data on the locations of ceramics, potters, and vendors, this paper considers the relative priority of spatial and social propinquity. In transporting goods, interaction with distantly related kin sometimes overrides distance minimizing tendencies.

Ethnoarchaeology: its nature, origins, and history

The problem for archaeologists, it appears, is that they are always too late … ( Tim Ingold 1999: ix ) Clearly a bout with ethnography is neither possible nor necessary for everyone. ( Susan Kus 1997: 209, after research among the Merina of Madagascar ) We begin by explaining why and how ethnoarchaeology came to be, and give an example from Peru as an illustration of what it is. Then, after explaining the plan of this book, we define the subject and offer a periodized history, concluding the chapter with a glimpse of what it is to be an ethnoarchaeologist. Why ethnoarchaeology? Archaeological interpretation is founded and ultimately depends upon analogy – a form of inference that holds that if something is like something else in some respects it is likely to be similar in others. We use it to recognize a flint flake as an artifact or, built into a long chain of reasoning, to impute a tributary mode of production to early civilizations (Trigger 1993: 45–6). Archaeologists draw upon their lives and upon everything they have read, heard about or seen in the search for possible analogies to the fragmentary remains they seek to interpret. By the mid-1950s attention was turning to a new range of questions about the past, to approaches to understanding the patterning in artifact assemblages that would lead beyond cultural chronologies and time-space systematics, the organization of cultural variety into convenient temporally and spatially limited packages such as phases and cultures (Willey and Phillips 1958).

Theorizing ethnoarchaeology and analogy

It is particularly because human beings delegate to artifacts, to exchange and to technical acts a large part of the construction and the conservation of their social ties that human societies constitute stable frameworks, in contradistinction to the societies of other primates that – transient because they lack things – require to be continuously (re)constructed by direct contacts (touches, looks, sounds, smells), and by the physical closeness and continuous active involvement of the participants. ( Anick Coudart 1992a: 262, our translation ). What recourse is there for the imaginatively challenged? ( Bruce Trigger 1998: 30 ) The vast majority of publications on ethnoarchaeology take no explicit theoretical position – which does not mean that they are atheoretical. In this chapter we offer the reader a basic toolkit with which to examine the theory, implicit or explicit, expressed in the ethnoarchaeological literature that we will be considering in the course of this book. For two reasons the toolkit we offer at this stage is a minimal one. First, most of us prefer to deal with theoretical complexities as they arise and in a factual context. Second, this is not the place to attempt to survey the wide web of theoretical positions taken by archaeologists (and to a lesser extent ethnoarchaeologists) following an influx of theory reaching anthropology in the 1970s and 1980s from a variety of sources including the philosophy of science, literary theory, and sociology.

Craft and Social Identity. Cathy Lynne Costin and Rita P. Wright, editors. 1998. Archaeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, Number 8. American Anthropological Association, Arlington, VA.vii+ 183 pp, 29 figures.

more needs to be done to gain a better understanding of the site (and its possible plazas) as a whole, as Wilcox clearly acknowledges. In another pair of chapters, Darrell G. Creel and Harry J. Shafer present different views of continuity between the Mimbres Classic and subsequent (Casas Grandes-related Black Mountain phase) developments in southwest New Mexico, a transition for which there are few chronometric dates. Creels case for continuity is based on extensive data showing that many material styles characteristic of the Black Mountain phase were already present in later Mimbres occupations. Shafer concentrates on describing the Mimbres belief system and ceremonial organization, which were apparently not perpetuated in the Black Mountain phase, and he argues that the end of this belief system supports the case for discontinuity. While Shafers argument against continuity is based primarily on assertion, his chapter provides important insights and detail on the Mimbres Classic system.