Social Learning Frameworks
Patricia Crown
Patricia Crown is currently a Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. She received her A.B., from the University of Pennsylvania, where she graduated summa cum laude with honors in Anthropology. In 1976, she received her Master’s in Anthropology from the University of Arizona. This was followed by achieving her Ph.D. from the University of Arizona in 1981. Her dissertation was titled, “Variability in Ceramic Manufacture at the Chodistaas Site, East-Central Arizona”. In 1984, Crown received her certificate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Center for Materials Research in Archaeology and Ethnography Summer Institute, Cambridge, MA, Ceramic Analysis. She has also been a Professor of Anthropology at Arizona State University (1991-1998) and Southern Methodist University (1985-1990). Patricia Crown has also served in many capacities for the American Anthropological Association, the Society for American Archaeology, and the Society for Archaeological Science.
Since the beginning of her career, Patricia Crown has focused her expertise on ceramic analysis and the American Southwest. Much of her previous research has been centered on ceramic production and its use for exchange, and thus the economic basis for materialization of communities. In the past few years she has moved towards using ceramic analysis to understand learning, the archaeology of childhood, and gender studies.
Crown has discussed how children have often been ignored by archaeology. In order to understand children and the concept of childhood, Crown has focused much of her research on learning frameworks. She seeks to understand the transmission of knowledge to children, and how it can change between cultures. This concept of learning frameworks is important, Crown states, in understanding craft production and how individuals come to be regarded as full members of their society.
Anthropology Courses taught at the University of New Mexico:
Ceramic Analysis, (Anth 480/580)
Southwestern Archaeology, (Anth 521)
Dissertation Research, (Anth 699)
Advanced Research, (Anth 698)
Problems, (Anth 697)
Selected Works:
“Life Histories of Pots and Potters: Situating the Individual in Archaeology,” American Antiquity 72 (2007): 677-90
“Learning and Teaching in the Prehispanic American Southwest,” pp. 108-24 in K. Kamp, ed., Children in the Prehistoric Puebloan Southwest (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 2002)
“Socialization in American Southwest Pottery Decoration,” pp. 25-43 in J. Skibo and G. Feinman, eds., Pottery and People (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1999)
With Barbara J. Mills (Editors). Ceramic Production in the American Southwest. The University of Arizona Press. 1995
