This post was written by Isabelle C. Druc. Paper titles and abstracts can be viewed here.
The symposium titled 'Cross-cultural petrographic studies of ceramic traditions' and chaired by Mary Ownby at the 2019 SAA was a welcome moment to reconnect with friends and colleagues, see great photomicrographs of ceramic pastes, pictures of beautiful landscapes, relate ceramic composition to geology and human behavior, and hear new hypotheses. The petrography session in Albuquerque, offered a good summary of ceramic analyses conducted in many parts of the globe and encompassing different time periods in pursuit of the complex relationships between human actions, communities of practice, group identity and society, approached via the study of ceramic technology and provenience. The studies presented often also integrated chemical and mineral studies, as it is now frequent in ceramic analysis. Ethnographic research was also part of the story, for example in David Killick and Edwin Wilmsen's study in Botswana, or Avila's study with Andean potters as one aspect of the study of Ester Echenique to identify communities of practice in consort with William Gilstrap. This was part of Echenique's PhD, which she defended a few days later in Tucson, and proof of the achievements possible in this field. The impact of colonization upon ceramic technology was another topic discussed, in this case by Suzanne Eckert and Deborah Huntley for a study of Pueblo pottery in the American Southwest. Andrew Womack analyzed pottery in relation to funerary practice to identify social groups in Neolithic China, while Trevor Duke, Neill Wallis and Ann Cordell looked at mortuary craft specialization of Late Woodland on the Gulf Coast. Keeping up with the theme of the session, Lorelei Platz and Carrie Dennett, presented a cross regional analysis of pottery production in Greater Nicoya, while Elizabeth Gravalos offered a diachronic perspective of 1600 years of ceramic technology at the highland Peruvian site of Jecosh. Wesley Stoner presented a case study based on quantitative petrography for temper provenance in the basin of Mexico, and John Lawrence, Scott Fitzpatrick, and Christina Glovas discussed a detailed petrographic study of Eastern Caribbean pottery. Diving into interpretative frameworks, Andrew Lack and Mary Ownby reflected upon the use of memetics as a possible theoretical approach to interpret petrographic data. Using Dawkin's definition of meme as an element of a culture or system of behavior that may be passed from one individual to another by nongenetic means Lack and Ownby explored ceramic traditions in the Phoenix Basin and the meme of temper selection. They used the memetic framework to explore how this meme would have developed, been transmitted, maintained, and changed, or not adopted.
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