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This article investigates ancestral Wendat pottery making in southern Ontario through the Wendat perspective of Sǫhahiyǫh, a Wendat potter. Our study is based on eyewitness accounts of Sǫhahiyǫh making pots, along with detailed photographs and his own artistic reflections on his gestures related to all stages of pottery making. To create a detailed description that sheds light on ancestral Wendat potting communities and their practices, we investigate the entanglement of material interactions, personalized embodied knowledge of a highly skilled potter, and Wendat practices and beliefs. Our research provides an enhanced understanding of ceramic traditions and demonstrates the opportunities that arise from building relationships with Indigenous community members and centering Indigenous perspectives to study past material practices in the Lower Great Lakes region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we employ a communities of practice approach to investigate precontact childhood social learning and pottery production in the Lower Great Lakes. Until recently, there has been an implicit assumption that childhood learning involved primarily parent-child interactions. Building on current research that has begun to improve understanding of Indigenous socialization strategies, we apply a multi-scalar decorative analysis to investigate traditions of learning among potting communities in Southern Ontario and upstate New York, from ca. 900–1650 CE. Through a series of statistical analyses, we demonstrate a remarkable continuity in motif practices by child potters that is not evident among skilled potters, who were more impacted by social, demographic, and economic changes in their communities. The multi-generational tradition spanning at least 750 years leads us to suggest that child potters learned primarily in child groups through peer-to-peer learning. Although peer-to-peer learning has been observed ethnographically, this practice has often been overlooked in archaeology and warrants further inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A communities-of-practices approach has been employed in this paper to investigate potting traditions of Late Woodland potters. The author has integrated Wenger’s (1998, Organization 7(2):225-246, 2000) constellation of practice and boundary objects with Smith’s (1997, 2005a) attribute combination system to study decorative practices of Middle Iroquoian potting communities in southern Ontario. The results of the study indicate similar distribution trends relating to the practice of decorative motifs. The author argues potters maintained potting traditions through time and space. This study demonstrates how the integration of more recent conceptual frameworks provides further opportunities to investigate the relation between pottery production and broader practices and beliefs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]