Chapter 3. Six Strategies for Ethnoarchaeology in the Future: Beyond Analogies and Cautionary Tales

ABSTRACT

This paper briefly explores six strategies by which ethnoarchaeology can transcend ethnographic analogies and cautionary tales to interpret patterns in the past. Although these strategies come out of the ethnographic study of ceramic technology, they may also apply to other cultural patterns. One strategy pursues leads from ethnographic research directly into the past using archaeological reconnaissance and then uses trace element analysis of modern raw materials and museum specimens to test hypotheses generated by that research. This strategy discovered the sources, the creation process, the wide distribution, and the probable makers of the ancient pigment Maya Blue. A second extends genealogies of potters’ families into the historic past using governmental records of birth, marriage, and death, revealing that household‐based production was the most persistent unit through time. A third strategy untangles the patterns of constraints on pottery production, such as weather, raw materials, and fabrication technology from social and cultural agency, narrowing hypotheses explaining ancient production intensity and organization in the past. A fourth strategy extracts cross‐cultural generalizations from comparative ethnography. This strategy can also eliminate improbable hypotheses about ancient pottery production and can identify ancient communities of practice. A fifth strategy tests archaeological theories using contemporary ethnoarchaeological data. Finally, ethnoarchaeology can test assumptions about the social and behavioral meaning of the trace element analyses of ancient pottery. Derived from the present for understanding cultural patterns of the past, these strategies provide some approaches for ethnoarchaeological research in the future.