Pottery and Practice is a case study that focuses on the pottery of two small, 14th-century pueblo villages in the Lower Rio Puerco area of New Mexico: Hummingbird Pueblo and Pottery Mound. Through analyzing the data collected from these two sites, author Suzanne Eckert, seeks to identify social practices and cultural influences that ultimately determine the design and technology of those groups’ pottery.
Eckert, an assistant professor of anthropology at Texas A&M University, specializes in the analysis of ceramic design, technology, and formal properties, particularly as seen in the archaeology of the American Southwest. Based on the data, she argues that pottery designs and techniques were employed to establish social identity and boundaries between various sub-groups, while still maintaining and advertising village-wide identification. She focuses on using material culture to determine pre-historic ethnicities and social boundaries between groups of people who might traditionally be broadly categorized as belonging to one uniform culture.
Practice theory is coming into its own among North American archaeologists, in large part because it encompasses a variety of analyses. Rooted in Marxism but not bound to it exclusively, practice theory emphasizes a variety of influences that contribute to human behavior. It is especially useful for studying material culture, because it deems objects to be a result of various social and practical influences.
Eckert’s analysis of the pottery leads to the conclusion that the early Pueblo IV period was probably dominated by the movement of kin groups between various villages. This was much more the case than with the later, more stable Pueblo people of the region. It is a story of migration and integration that includes a ritual system based on a more pan-Southwestern cosmology.
Heavily documented and at times technical, this book will appeal most to those scholars and laypeople who appreciate a demonstration of contemporary cultural anthropological practice theory applied to ancient Southwest potteries. —Cynthia Martin
