INTRODUCTION TO ARCHAEOLOGY Nancy White - Touro Institute

studies look at the scratches and tiny chips and other signs of use on different materials: cutting
meat leaves different patterns than cutting wood or hoeing soil. Residue analysis now includes
even looking at traces of DNA in blood on the edges of stone tools to see what species of steak
was being cut up!
Why does your book list ceramic artifacts right after stone? Fired clay artifacts also preserve
well, are often the next-oldest kind recovered, and also reflect our Western penchant for
classification based on technology. Firing clay to make figurines was known in the Upper
Paleolithic, some 25,000 years ago, in Europe and elsewhere. Apparently this technology was
then either lost or at least not used much until about 10,000 years ago, when people started
making earthenware vessels for holding things, presumably mostly food, and cooking food. We
still eat off plates that are mostly fired clay, unless we have paper or plastic or styrofoam!
What attributes of ceramics can be studied? Pottery is a more plastic medium, allowing the
makers to incorporate more variability. If you make a mistake or change your mind when
chipping stone tools you need to reshape the piece into something smaller or throw it away and
start over. With pottery you can reshape the wet clay before you fire it, and even add things after
it is fired, such as engraving or painting. There are many more pottery types than stone tool
types, at least in southeastern U.S. archaeology. The standard artifact we find is a potsherd, a
broken piece (pass some around), but what other things are made of clay? Figurines, spindle
whorls, whistles, etc.
What are the raw materials for ceramic artifacts? Natural clays, of course, and also often temper
or aplastic, some material added to the clay for various reasons, from the functional (better
firing) to the stylistic. Who in the class has made pottery? What are the possible tempering
agents? In the Southeast we find sand, grit (crushed quartzite), shell (crushed), and grog (crushed
clay fragments, often probably old pots, maybe smashed in a fit of temper!). The earliest pottery
in North America was tempered with plant fibers; in Florida this was Spanish moss, like we see
hanging on the trees outside this building. The fibers burned out and left squiggly line open
spaces in the clay (show example). Besides describing the clay minerals, the clay sources, and
the decorative or surface treatment of the pot (stamping, incising, punctating, painting, etc.; show
examples), we can determine something else about the manufacturing technology. In the New
World there was no potter’s wheel. Early vessels were simply hand-built, like that first one you
did in kindergarten. For the last 3,000 years pottery was made by the coil method, rolling a big
snake-like form in your hands and coiling it around to shape the pot, then smoothing it. If we
find a sherd of sand-tempered pottery that has uniform wheel marks on it at a Florida
archaeological site we know it is from a Spanish olive jar, which very much resembles Indian
pottery except for this technological clue.
What are fancier types of ceramics and how are they made? Old World technologies early
produced fine china, vitrified clay we call glass, and fancy glazes able to be done because higher
firing temperatures could be achieved. Does this mean New World peoples “lagged behind” and
were not as bright as the Chinese or Egyptians? Maybe in glass manufacture, but does this mean
in the rest of their technology or other areas of life? Remember that in this class we want to
abolish the use of the terms “primitive” and “advanced,” since they are making ethnocentric