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Mimbres painted pottery from the U.S. Southwest is renowned for its spectacular designs. Literature on style and identity suggests three concepts helpful for understanding its social significance: boundaries, multiple dimensions of variation, and historical context. This article investigates these concepts by synthesizing past studies with new analyses. The distribution of Mimbres pottery is strongly bounded, demonstrated with data from the cyberSW project. Variation in designs is multidimensional: (1) individual artists created distinctive styles; (2) specific designs are distributed homogeneously across the region, a conclusion demonstrated in part with new analyses of the geometric designs; and (3) pan-regionally, the designs’ content, regular structure, and appearance on multiple media suggest they were meaning-charged. Considering these findings in their historical context provides insights into the pottery's social significance and elaboration: population growth in the resource-rich Mimbres region engendered land tenure systems, marked in part by burials that included pottery. The pottery came to convey the message “I belong here” from two perspectives. By adopting the pottery, people, including migrants, signaled their acceptance of established ways of life in the region, and their access to the pottery indicated their acceptance in the social milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Explanations for the use of pots as practical domestic tools permeate the literature of technological adoption and change. While many arguments focus on the economic merits of pots, few have attempted to trace the conditions that promote or deter the adoption of pottery. This is especially true for the use of pottery by mobile peoples. We adapt an established model of technological investment to draw attention to three key variables affecting pottery adoption: manufacturing time, utility, and use time. We use the logic of this model to examine how social and environmental contexts, specifically residential mobility in marginal environments, impacts use of and investment in ceramic technology. We further illustrate how the model can be used to reveal seasonal patterns of behavior from the spatial distribution of pottery discarded by mobile foragers and herders. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Magdalena Black-on-white ceramics from two sites (Gallinas Springs and Pinnacle Ruin) in west-central and southwestern New Mexico have been interpreted as evidence of a migration of Northern Pueblo groups from the Four Corners region into southwestern New Mexico during the thirteenth century. They also appear to be linked to sites with similar carbon-painted ceramics on the Rio Puerco of the east and beyond. An additional site (Roadmap Village) reveals import of Magdalena Black-on-white ceramics produced at Gallinas Springs as well as possible local production. Limited quantities of carbon paint ceramics have been found on El Paso Phase sites in south-central New Mexico that have previously been attributed to contemporaneous carbon-painted pottery produced at communities in the Galisteo Basin and the upper Rio Grande. Recent compositional analysis of carbon-painted ceramics from the Gallinas Springs, Pinnacle, and Roadmap sites has identified characteristic chemical signatures that suggest local production of carbon paint ceramics at all three sites and distribution of carbon paint ceramics from Gallinas Springs to Pinnacle and Roadmap in the eastern Black Range of southwestern New Mexico. Analysis of carbon paint ceramics from Madera Quemada, an El Paso Phase site in the Tularosa Basin indicates that the carbon paint wares found in El Paso Phase sites were acquired through trade connections from the Black Range rather than from more northern sources. The overall Magdalena Black-on-white production patterns are contrasted with the obsidian procurement data from the same sites to reveal a complex and divergent pattern. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artists and designers have recently begun to take an active role in contextualising the creative process in relation to their practice. Thus, understanding how the creative mind proceeds has been supplemented with knowledge obtained inside the creative process. In this way, the spheres of knowledge, material thinking and experience that are fostered through creative work have become entangled and embedded as elemental parts of the research process. This article is based on documentation and reflection of the author's creative practice in contemporary ceramic art at the beginning of 2015. The article discusses how the creative process proceeds by alternating between two positions: serendipity and intentionality. By describing the different phases of the process, it reveals the interplay between the diverse range of activities and how these gradually construct the creative process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is about socio-cultural aspects associated with pottery-making ancient material cultures. The study is based on research carried out in Northern Jordan. The article analyses the forming techniques of cooking pots and emphasis evaluates the set of physical variables that potters keep in mind to shape cookware so that it can withstand its intended use.

This article reports the discovery of colour-decorated pottery dating to the third millennium bc from the Isle of Man, the earliest yet known from the British Isles. Scientific studies of the vessel highlight technical aspects of its manufacture which are then used to situate the vessel in a wider social and cultural context through a brief review of its wider biography. The choice of colours — white, black and red — and their arrangement on the vessel walls are linked to wider north European symbolic schemes reflected also in contemporary pottery, mobiliary and rock art. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The article discusses Chahta Ilukfi Nan Isht Ikbit (Choctaw Pottery), including its 3,500 year history, the revitalization of Choctaw pottery, the relationship between pottery and Choctaw culture and photographs and diagrams of Choctaw pottery. An overview of the Choctaw's use of pottery for eating and serving food is provided.

This paper analyzes the Hopi yellow ware design system in terms of the plane pattern symmetries that structure the designs. This analysis reveals that the advent of the yellow wares correlates with the aggregation of farming villages into large pueblos in response to the thirteenth-century drought. Coincident with this settlement change is a shift from geometric designs organized by bifold rotation that metaphorically represent the reciprocities central to the corn lifeway to quasi-representational images organized by a number of different symmetries, some new to the region. Oral tradition indicates that Hopi villages are composed of many different groups of people, each with their own rituals and living practices. This paper suggests that the new symmetries and images not only mark the arrival of these in-migrating groups to Hopi villages but also the development of new social institutions to organize these larger communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article serves as an interpretation of Nipmuc history in colonial contexts by focusing on the engagement and survival of the 'capitalist colonial' world by the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Nipmuc inhabitants of the Sarah Boston Farmstead Site in Grafton, Massachusetts. Ceramic analyses are drawn upon to argue that active consumer strategies and/or choices may potentially undermine the material and discursive markers of difference linked to notions of domesticity, class and race. The apparent homogenized or 'insignificant' character of the Sarah Boston Farmstead ceramic assemblage is argued to in fact be quite significant, as its banality speaks to a degree of knowledgeable 'mimicry'-tactical or not-that may have deflected (but not negated) inequality through the undermining of markers and discourses of difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents new information regarding Starčevo-Criş pottery from Cristian I (Sibiu County), resulted from the salvation excavations carried on the 4th section of Sibiu-Orăştie Highway, at the end of 2011, this time focusing on the ornamentation analysis. There are presented, in a graphic form, but also described as a dictionary, the new codes that were identified and it was included a comparative cluster analysis with other Early Neolithic sites from Romania, who benefited of the same type of pottery studies methods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the social and cultural role of maiolica pottery in Renaissance Italy. Topics include the influence of Islamic designs and styling on the work of Italian potters, the use of maiolica as display pieces rather than for dining service, the ceramics' low cost compared to metalware, and the relationship of women to maolica.

Terracotta is an important daily life profession, which shows up cultural identity in Turkish Hand Crafts. These hand crafts of terracotta become decorative features according to their functions. And ceramics with forms of animals are specialties of their group. This study is about two bird formed ceramic pots. Which are possibly doves and belong to the collection of Turkish and Islamic Art Museum and Çinili Köşk (The Tiled Chalet) in ş İ stanbul. First of all the study will establish these ceramic pots according to their material colour, technics, form and ornament. After this, these ceramic pots will compared with sphero-conical formed ceramic pots of art history of Turkish ceramic Art. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mound of Tarsus-Gözlükule is located in the Cilician Plain in southern Turkey at the crossroads of important trade routes tying the central Anatolian Plateau to the Mediterranean and Syro-Anatolian worlds. This paper presents a technological assessment of two different pottery production processes at Tarsus-Gözlükule during the Early Bronze Age--namely, the Light Clay and the Red Gritty Ware types. The Red Gritty Ware appears abruptly at the beginning of the Early Bronze Age, reaches high levels of distribution within the settlement, and remains a distinct production process from the other dominant ware type, the Light Clay Ware, for the duration of the third millennium B.C. Mineralogical, morphological, and chemical analyses from selected Early Bronze Age pottery samples are incorporated into more traditional stylistic analysis to define the technological framework of each production process and to investigate their interaction with the economic and social structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A small pit was discovered during the excavations conducted in 2007 at the Kalnik-Igrišče II site, containing 17.5 kg of pottery vessel fragments. This paper provides a morphological, typological and statistical analysis of the pottery, and the entire context of the find is consistent with the finds known in literature as pottery depots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the pottery trade in Tlayacapan in the state of Morelos, Mexico. In particular, it studies social factors, including how changes in the role of agriculture at the household level, the privatization of land, and an increase in outside employment opportunities have impacted the trade. It also looks at how changes in the way pottery is done in Tlayacapan have come about as a result of the emergence of decorative figures as a form of ceramics. The article explains that younger potters tend to embrace the production of these ornamental pieces, while older potters continue to produce the housewares that have traditionally been more typical of the trade in Tlayacapan.

In the region of Chapada dos Guimarães, Western Brazil, planters relied heavily on slave labor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this article, we examine the locally produced pottery found on slaves contexts in five rural sites of this region. Based in data from probate inventories and the pottery decorative variability we suggest that slaves used decorated pottery to express cultural and social differences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the Egyptian valuation of imported Minoan and locally produced Minoanizing pottery: that is, why Egyptians found this pottery desirable, which Egyptians wanted it, and which were able to acquire it. In order to address these questions, this study first reviews the archaeological contexts of all Minoan and Minoanizing pottery in Egypt, and then compares this archaeological evidence to the textual and iconographic data on Egyptian attitudes towards Minoan goods. The results suggest that while ownership of this pottery may have carried some cultural cachet as a mark of cosmopolitan sensibilities, it was not restricted to the highest officials. Instead, the more widespread availability of Minoan and Mi- noanizing pottery may have enabled Egyptians from various socioeconomic backgrounds to participate in an internationalizing cultural milieu. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-culturally, clay cooking pots are correlated with societies situated in warm and dry climates and reliant on foods that benefit from prolonged moist cooking. Neither of these conditions, however, characterized the aboriginal coastal Arctic, where clay cooking containers were produced and used for more than 2,500 years. We explore the factors that encouraged pottery use in the Arctic and conclude that the adoption of cooking pots resulted from the interplay of social and functional factors. We propose that it was adopted (1) to meet the needs of socially constructed preferences for cooked foods and (2) to overcome specific problems associated with other cooking methods within the local social and environmental context. We demonstrate the importance of adopting an integrated perspective in the study of technology—one that considers how cultural values and social practices interact with environmental and economic factors to shape technological decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: During the middle Holocene, profound changes in environment, economy, and social relations laid the foundations for the emergence of Africa’s earliest polities: the Egyptian Old Kingdom and the Kerma state. Regional shifts in economy and society may be reflected in local changes in patterning of ceramic production and exchange. Analysis of two pottery assemblages from Sai Island, north Sudan, reveals dramatic shifts in the scale of cultural spheres and the nature of cross-cultural interaction between 5000 BC (Khartoum Variant) and 2600 BC (Pre-Kerma). Near-sedentary Khartoum Variant hunter–gatherers at site 8-B-10C participated in a longstanding cultural sphere that extended far into the Sahara, but were beginning to focus more tightly on resources by the Nile. By Pre-Kerma times, Sai occupants familiar with animal husbandry started to use southwest Asian plant domesticates; they began to experiment with large-scale storage facilities and engage in long-distance trade along the Nile, outside of their own cultural boundaries. Beyond a shift in axes for contact from east–west to north–south, these changes signal progressive geographic and temporal compression of cultural entities, amidst accelerating processes of economic innovation and social change that finally culminated in the polities of Egypt and Kerma. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

We report a new site with locally made pottery on the Western Torres Strait island of Mabuyag (Mabuiag). The study uses petrographic and chronological results to reassess the antiquity of pottery in the region. It adds to knowledge which points to significant changes in the Torres Strait after 1700 BP. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From its inception in 1756, the Sèvres porcelain manufactory made elaborate, highly decorated dinner services for the exclusive use of the royal court. The objects used by the king were seen as extensions of his body and the act of decorating them became a means of royal veneration. While the French Revolution saw the decline of the manufacture, Napoléon recognized the enormous political value of Sèvres porcelain. Imperial power, however, was predicated not on the divinity of the Emperor, but on the clear demonstration of the material and cultural benefits brought about by his administration. This shift in the nature of executive power prompted a change in the design and decoration of Sères porcelain. Rococo decoration found in ancien régime porcelain was abandoned in favour of a highly didactic imagery that charted the triumphs and benefits of Napoleon's regime. This article sets out to examine this new repertoire of subjects and forms with specific reference to the Service de I'Empereur. Commissioned to be used at the wedding of Napoléon and his second wife Marie-Louise of Austria (daughter of the recently defeated Emperor of Austria), the service charts some of the events connected with French Imperial expansion, not least of which was the marriage itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Existing interpretations of Amazonia's pre-colonial chiefdoms, frequently reproduced in academic surveys, have helped create a grandiose image of the region's past. However, the results of new archaeological research conducted in the lower Amazon, combined with a closer engagement with Amazonian ethnology, diverge from the dominant interpretative model and cast doubts on its explanatory value. Based on ethnohistorical projections, social evolutionary theories and still incomplete material evidence, the model proposed by archaeologist Anna Roosevelt has produced essentialist reconstructions of the Amazonian past, which (among other problems) tend to over-emphasize the historical distance from contemporary indigenous Amazonian societies. This article provides a critical discussion of new archaeological evidence from the Santarém region of the lower Amazon, reopening the debate on the emergence of late pre-colonial chiefdoms from a wider perspective. The analysis combines factors traditionally included by archaeology, such as demographics, ecology, settlement patterns and territorial organization, with 'intangible' aspects relating to sociocosmology, inferred from an analysis of pottery iconography. As well as exposing the inadequacy of a conceptual framework employing an ethnocentric definition of Amazonian chiefdoms and political power, the article reveals a more socially diverse historical panorama, structurally and symbolically closer to late pre-colonial social formations and contemporary indigenous societies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Archaeologists have generally viewed the appearance of Khirbet Kerak Ware (KKW) in the southern Levant in the early 3rd millennium BC in terms of a movement into the area of population groups of east Anatolian origin. However, there are serious theoretical and empirical objections to this position. It is suggested that by concentrating upon KKW as a macro-level phenomenon, scholars have neglected to consider the existence of significant inter-community distinctions in the scale and manner in which KKW was employed. This paper offers an alternative view which sees KKW as a material resource, knowledge of which was linked to participation in previously existing coastal networks of communication, the adoption or rejection of which was linked to socio-economic conditions prevailing in specific areas of the southern Levant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the course of clay modeling. Allegedly, the greater part of clay modeling is expressive of the work done in science, geography, history and literature. Upon the manufacture of pottery in the school, which includes the modeling, decorating, and glazing, the students are able to enter more fully into the industrial side of primitive and of modern life. Further, historical scenes and literature are taught upon creating it in the round and in low relief and at the same time casting it in plaster or baked in the kiln.