Social Learning Frameworks
The Origins and History of Ceramic Sociology
Before the advent of processualist archaeology artifacts were classified based on constructions of time and space, no matter the questions being asked. As dissatisfaction with the culture history approach increased archaeologists began to view the classification of artifacts differently. Ceramic sociology found its start when Constance Cronin, a graduate student at the University of Chicago, noted, as told by William A. Longacre, that the “decoration of pottery might reflect the learning frameworks of mothers teaching daughters, and so on” (O’Brien, Lyman & Schiffer 2005, 68). This comment and way of analyzing the artifacts, Southwestern pottery, was vastly different to what had been done until then. William A. Longacre and James Hill took note of this idea and applied and expanded it to their work in the Southwestern United States. They supposed that if one considered the spatial distribution of the variation found in the decorative elements of pottery, then the archaeologists could reach valid hypotheses about the kinship patterns of that culture.
As Lewis Binford’s New Archaeology took hold, new classification systems arose. Longacre reported that Binford supported their new theories and offered some ideas of his own. Longacre and Hill continued to work on this subject; their dissertations employed this theory by using multivariate analysis on Arizonan pottery. Though ironically, it was the statistical analysis that was considered a weak spot of ceramic sociology. Longacre published his dissertation first (1963), paving the way for Hill’s dissertation on Broken K Pueblo (1965), both offering methodology on how to reconstruct aspects of social organization from their findings. This methodology focused on the cultural transmission of stylistic microtradtions in the prehistoric southwest (Stark and Skibo 2007). It is important to note that they assumed that only women were making pottery and that the transmission of technological knowledge flowed from female to female. At the Carter Ranch site, Longacre specifically looked for ceramic stylistic evidence to support his theory. He felt that if ceramic tradition were being passed down matrilocally then stylistic microtraditions would appear in geographically distinct clusters. His results were published as part of Lewis Binford’s influential book, New Perspectives in Archaeology.
However, not everyone accepted Longacre’s findings. He was subjected to criticism for his theoretical ideas and for what some viewed as factless assumptions. In response to these criticisms, Longacre decided to embark on an ethnoarchaeological project that would focus on ceramic decoration in the Philippine’s, as a way to find more support for his ideas. He chose to work with the Kalinga because they were a relatively small tribal society where the women would make pottery for household use. His research goals in the Philippines were 1) to develop fine scale measures for recording stylistic variability in their pottery, and 2) to understand and record the social context of pottery making (Stark and Skibo 2007).
The Origins of Communities of Practice
The concept of communities of practice did not originate in anthropology, but with the Swiss theorist, Etienne Wenger. Wegner first coined the term with Jean Lave in their book, Situated Learning: Legitimate Peripheral Participation (1991), and went on to author the influential tome Communities of Practice: Learning, meaning and identity (1998). Wegner describes communities of practice in its simplest form as, “groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly” (<http://www.ewenger.com/theory/index.htm>). These groups can include everyone from artists seeking out new artistic methods, students in school trying to find their identities, or a village adapting in order to survive. The fundamental principle of this is that engaging in social practices is how people learn and defines who they are. Here we see a move away from focusing solely on the individual and towards the unit that is the community of practice. Wegner developed this theory as a broad conceptual framework that would explain the overlap between social practice, identity, meaning, and learning. He calls this the intersection of intellectual traditions (Wegner 1998).
The community within communities of practice is not traditional. Your neighborhood maybe your community, but that is not necessarily a community of practice. As mentioned, a community of practice is a group of individuals who are working towards a common goal and who are experiencing the same activities, discussions, and helping one another. As they learn from one another they form a community of practice.
Wegner’s work on communities of practice has spread through many academic fields and the business world. However, though the concept has been the focus of new studies in archaeology, especially within ceramics in the American Southwest, there has been a lack of acknowledgement of Wegner’s contribution. Some archaeologists have referenced his work as “cognitive theory research” (Stark 2006, 23) which has helped guide anthropology to current practices theories, but they have not given him due for communities of practice.
Communities of Practice: An Archaeological Perspective
As mentioned, archaeology has started expand on Wegner’s idea of communities of practice. Building on ceramic sociology’s belief that pottery can be used to study social boundaries and organizational change, southwestern archaeologists have been looking at the variability in ceramic stylistic decoration at various levels of social organization (Stark 2006). As ceramic sociology came out of the culture-history and processualism debate of the 1960’s and 1970’s, the idea of the social lives of pots came out after the processual-postprocessual debate of the 1990’s. Now most archaeologists acknowledge that ceramics are not passive reflectors of style, but that also we cannot go to far in the other direction and embrace the symbolic-structural ceramic studies that characterized the 1980’s. Again building on past research, ceramicists have embraced ethnoarchaeological research and have been using it to understand the technical choices of past potters, the stylistic choices, and material preference. The advent of ethnoarchaeological research in order to study the social aspect of pottery has contributed to archaeologies understanding of communities of practice.
Community of practice theory has become more popular as archaeologists realize that past labels for social units have fatal limitations. Two villages that sit across a river are not necessarily separate communities; the same technological and/or stylistic traditions can appear at both sites. Ethnoarchaeological research has proven that a scalar unpredictability does exist in communities of practice (Gosselain 1998; Stark 2006). The term local system has been introduced as a way to move beyond previous social units, such as community or village. Local system can encompass multiple clusters of residences whose inhabitants share similar practices. These residential clusters also tend to have shared some sort of social links as well.
The local system concept has also been supported by ongoing geochemical and petrographic research. Miksa and Heidke (2001) introduced a regional method of ceramic provenance analysis by utilizing microscopic data comparing sands collected in the Tonto Basin, Arizona with the sand tempered utilitarian pottery from three separate project zones in the area. Using point count analysis and multivariate analysis the authors developed a petrofacies model that illustrated intraregional exchange relationships. This provenance study showed that pottery was produced for exchange in at least one of the petrofacies around A.D. 600-950. By A.D. 1150 two petrofacies had established specialized production ware.
Nelson and Habicht-Mauche (2006) used lead isotope and petrographic analysis of Rio Grande Glaze Ware pottery and paints to identify geographic clusters. The analyses of the pottery and paints indicate intercommunity interaction during the Pueblo IV period, by demonstrating that the circulation of raw materials and end product of ceramic production serve to establish and reaffirm the social links between these regional clusters.
Learning Frameworks and the Archaeology of Childhood
Until recently archaeology has managed to basically ignore two very important topics: the mechanics of learning and children. In trying to explore how knowledge is transmitted from the skilled practitioner to the unskilled learner, Crown (2007) turns to literature from other fields, such as education, psychology, and neurophysiology. Each subject or task requires its own set of learning rhetoric. One must know what they need to learn, how it is being learned, and why (Crown 2007). Understanding learning frameworks is pivotal when trying to understand how individuals become fully functioning members of their society, how children are included into craft production, the importance of child labor, how adults allot time, and the likelihood of error or originality in the creative process (Crown 2002). As Crown states, learning frameworks can include verbal instruction, observation and imitation, hands-on demonstration, and self-teaching (Crown 2002, 109). This has been corroborated by ethnographic research done in the American Southwest. In 1994 Crown argued that poor quality vessels of Salado polychrome were made by children. She continued to explore this arguement by looking at all of the poorly made vessels in American museums, hoping to find indications of learning frameworks and teaching methods in the vessels. This returns to many of the same issues of ceramic sociology, except that instead of learning about sociol organization her goal was to learn how unskilled workers moved towards full participation in craft production, knowledge circulation, and how they learned.
We see the debate over skill and learning in ceramics as well. In pottery creation the production steps fluctuate depending on level of difficulty the practitioner is capable of. Creating a ceramic vessel requires several kinds of knowledge. First one must know where to gather materials, how to mix them so that you have the ideal composition, how to shape a vessel, how to polish, slip, and/or decorate the vessel, and then how to fire the vessel safely. Decoration requires another set of knowledge, as the creator must know the appropriate design parameters and proportions, something that requires practice. As Bagwell (2002) demonstrates, varying cognitive developmental stages can affect the level of difficulty that a child can master. She argues that children are only capable of certain parts of the vessel-forming process at certain developmental stages, allowing archaeologists to determine a minimum age of the vessel creator.
Another heated debate that has received attention in the last several years is unskilled vs. child producers. In the past if a vessel was found that was small, not well formed, and/or had rudimentary decorations it was assumed to have been produced by a child. However, we can again see from ethnographic data, as well as our own lives, that unskilled adults can create pieces that look like what we stereotypically picture a young child would make. Kamp (2002) makes this argument after studying ethnographic data. She points out that cross-cultural literature points out the importance of children’s work, and that child labor can decrease the amount of work the adult does instead of adding to it, as was previously assumed.
Works Cited:
Bagwell, Elizabeth A.
2002 Ceramic form and skill: attempting to identify child producers at Pecos Pueblo, New Mexico.In Children in the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. Kathryn A. Kamp, ed. Pp 90- 107. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Bamforth, D.B & Finlay, N.
2008 Introduction: archaeological approaches to lithic production skill and craft learning. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory 15:1-27.
Baxter, J.E.
2008 The Archaeology of Childhood. Annual Review of Anthropoogy 37: 159-175
Cordell, L.
2006. Rio Grande glaze paint ware in southwestern archaeology. In Social Lives of Pots. Judith A. Habicht-Mauche, Suzanne L. Eckert, and Deborah L. Huntley, eds. Pp 253-271. Tucson: University of Arizona Press
Crown, Patricia L.
1999 Socialization in American Southwest pottery decoration. In Pottery and People a Dynamic Interaction. James M. Skibo and Gary M. Feinman, eds. Pp 25-43. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
2002 Learning and teaching in the prehispanic American Southwest. In Children in the Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. Kathryn A. Kamp, ed. Pp 108-124. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
2007 Learning about learning. In Archaeological Anthropology Perspectives on Method and Theory. James M. Skibo, Michael W. Graves, and Miriam T. Stark, eds. Pp 198-217. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Gosselain, O.P.
1998 Social and technical identity in a clay crystal ball. In The Archaeology of Social Boundaries, M.T. Stark ed., 78-106. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press
Kamp, Kathryn A.
2002 Working for a living: childhood in the prehistoric Southwestern pueblos." In Children in the prehistoric Puebloan Southwest. Kathryn A. Kamp, ed. Pp 71-89. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Miksa, E.J. and Heidke, J.M.
2001 It all comes out in the wash: actualistic petrofacies modeling of temper provenance, Tonto Basin, Arizona, USA. Geoarchaeology 16 (2): 177-222.
Nelson, Kit and Habicht-Mauche, Judith A.
2006 Lead, paint, and pots: Rio Grande intercommunity dynamics from a glaze ware perspective.In Social Lives of Pots. Judith A. Habicht-Mauche, Suzanne L. Eckert, and Deborah L. Huntley, eds. Pp 197-215. Tucson: University of Arizona Press
O'Brien, M.J.
2005 Archaeology as a Process: Processualism and Its Progeny. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press.
Schiffer, M
1972 Behavioral Archaeology. New York: Academic Press
Stark, Miriam T., and James M. Skibo
2007 A history of the Kalinga Ethnoarchaeological Project. In Archaeological Anthropology Perspectives on Method and Theory. James M. Skibo, Michael W. Graves, and Miriam T. Stark, eds. Pp 93-110. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.
Stark, Miriam T.
2006 Glaze ware technology. the social lives of pots, and communities of practice in the late prehistoric southwest. In Social Lives of Pots. Judith A. Habicht-Mauche, Suzanne L. Eckert, and Deborah L. Huntley, eds. Pp 17-33. Tucson: University of Arizona Press
Wenger, Etienne
1998 Communities of practice: learning, meaning, and identity. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press
Criticism and Ideas for Future Research
In order to fully explore communities of practice within the archaeological record, we should focus on the operational sequence as well as the decorative process. Studying the steps that go into finding and processing the raw material and then creating the pottery would give this study a firmer methodological approach. Even with the regional focus purely on glaze wares, there is a 400 year period of stylistic and compositional change to explore.
Cordell (2006) stresses that while the research being done on this subject has offered interesting perspectives, she feels that it is lacking in theoretical construct. She sees a lack of theory focusing on the “distribution and consumer end of the pottery life cycle” (Cordell 2006, 267). Stark (2006) raises the point that more theoretical research needs to be done, and that archaeological ceramic studies should contribute to the social life of things. Another criticism of Cordell’s, as well as an avenue for future research, is a lack of addressing the complete life histories of pots.
As we can see through the book, Children in the Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest (Kamp 2002) archaeological evidence does show the importance of children in the past, as well as their being an integral part of the work force. However, this research is still in the preliminary phases, and more work needs to be done in order to create strong arguments about the economic roles of prehistoric children.
Criticisms of Ceramic Sociology
Many critics have found fault in the research behind ceramic sociology. One of the central arguments revolved around the fact that Puebloan potters were both female and male. Also, while ceramic decorative traditions could have been handed down through families, painters would also copy designs from one another and from archaeological pottery (Bamforth and Finlay 2008). Schiffer (1972) pointed out that the understanding of spatial clusters was problematic as it assumed that the pottery was made, used, and abandoned in the same area. Later ceramicists attempted to address these criticisms by taking site formation processes into account, as well as undertaking large amounts of ethnoarchaeological and experimental research.
Broken K Pueblo
