The Origins of Pottery Among Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in California and the Western Great Basin
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See discussions, stats, and author profiles for this publication at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/35493087 The origins of pottery among late prehistoric hunter-gatherers in california and the western great basin / Article · December 2000 Source: OAI CITATIONS READS 9 258 2 authors, including: Jelmer W. Eerkens University of California, Davis 117 PUBLICATIONS 1,997 CITATIONS SEE PROFILE Some of the authors of this publication are also working on these related projects: Evolution of Intoxicant Plant Use View project All content following this page was uploaded by Jelmer W. Eerkens on 03 September 2014. The user has requested enhancement of the downloaded file. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA Santa Barbara The Origins of Pottery among Late Prehistoric Hunter-Gatherers in California and the Western Great Basin A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Anthropology by Jelmer W. Eerkens Committee in charge: Professor Michael Jochim, Chairperson Professor Mark Aldenderfer Professor Robert Bettinger Professor Michael Glassow i The dissertation of Jelmer W. Eerkens is approved _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ _______________________________________________ Committee Chairperson December 2000 ii December, 2000 Copyright by Jelmer W. Eerkens 2000 iii Acknowledgements Many people and organizations provided support and assistance to help make this dissertation a reality. I would like to thank the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research for providing funding in the form of a Predoctoral Grant (#6259), and the National Science Foundation for granting a Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Grant (#9902836). These funds were crucial to help pay for the Instrumental Neutron Activation Analyses, Gas-Chromatography Mass-Spectrometry analyses, and some supplementary dating, palaeobotanical, and other research referenced in the text. As well, I would like to thank the UCSB Graduate Division for a Social Sciences and Humanities Grant that helped to pay for various analyses, including part of the INAA study. A Dissertation Write-up fellowship from the UCSB Graduate Division and a Service-Spaulding fellowship from the UCSB Anthropology Department allowed me to devote full-time work to writing the dissertation. I could not have completed the dissertation without support from all these granting agencies, and I thank them very much for aiding my research. I would also like to thank my committee members, Dr.’s Michael Jochim, Mark Aldenderfer, Robert Bettinger, and Michael Glassow for their comments, discussions, and overall support throughout the last 7 years. Their enthusiasm for archaeology has been an inspiration. Access to archaeological collections was essential for this research. I thank the following individuals and institutions for granting access to collections, including allowing me to undertake destructive analysis on pot sherds: Mark Allen and the US Army for access to the Fort Irwin collections; Caven Clark, Blair Davenport, and Tim Canaday of the National Park Service for access to the Death Valley materials; Tom Burge and Nelson Sieveking of the National Park Service for access to the Sequoia assemblages; Carolyn Shepherd of the Department of Defense and Amy Gilreath and Bill Hildebrandt of Far Western Anthropological Research Group for access to and assistance with the China Lake materials; Don Laylander and the California Department of Transportation, Kirk Halford, Russell Kaldenberg, and Steve Addington of the Bureau of Land Managament, Linda Reynolds of the United States Forest Service, Mark Basgall and Wendy Pierce of California State University Sacramento, and Lisa Deitz and Robert Bettinger of the UC Davis Anthropology Museum, for access to the Owens Valley collections; the Ridgecrest Bureau of Land Management office, Lisa Deitz, Robert Bettinger, the UC Davis Anthropology Museum, and Michael Delacorte of California State University Sacramento for help and access to the Deep Springs potsherds; and Colleen Beck and Anne DuBarton of Desert Research Institute for making the Nevada Test Site collections available for study and destruction. I also thank Elva Younkin of the Maturango Museum in Ridgecrest, Dr. Matthew Hall of the UC Riverside Anthropology Department, John Rumming of the California State Museum Resource Center and Department of Parks and Recreation, and Beth Sennett-Porter of the Eastern California Museum for iv allowing me to examine pottery collections and whole pots from the study area. Finally, I would like to doubly thank Lisa Deitz for all of her legwork in coordinating communication between so many different federal and state agencies and for loaning out the Alabama Gates and CA-Iny-30 collections. Obviously the research was impossible without the assistance of these people! I thank Michael Glascock, Hector Neff, and Sergio Herrera for teaching me the ropes with regards to INAA and ceramic sourcing during my stay at the Missouri University Research Reactor. I thank MURR for inviting me to participate in the Archaeometry program as a Research Assistant during January to May of 1998, it was a very enriching experience! Discussions with these individuals really opened my eyes to how much can be learned about prehistoric behavior from a bunch of brownware sherds! I also thank the NSF for their continued support of MURR under grant #SBR-9503035. I also kindly thank Dr. Stuart Smith of the UCSB Anthropology Department and James Pavolovich of the UCSB Chemistry Department for assistance in the organic residue GC-MS study, and enduring my endless questions about the process. For the GC-MS study, I would also like to thank Richard Evershed of University of Bristol and Anton Rieker of the Institut fuer Organische Chemie at Universitaet Tuebingen for help in identifying some ambiguous compounds and making samples of other compounds available for analysis. The National Institute of Standards (NIST) was also very generous in loaning their library of mass-spectra and AMDIS programs to assist in the identification of compounds recovered by GC-MS. I have also benefited from discussions, preprints, access to unpublished information and other assistance from the following people: Karen Anderson, Mark Basgall, Eric Blinman, Nathan Craig, Mike Delacorte, John Kantner, Elizabeth Klarich, Margaret Lyneis, Greg Seymour, Dave Thomas, Kevin Vaughn, and all my friends and compatriots at UCSB. I also thank Dr. Scott Raymond and the Archaeology Department at the University of Calgary for making me feel so welcome and providing office space during my stay in Calgary. I also give thanks to my family for their continued love and support, both emotional and financial. Finally, and most importantly, I thank my loving wife and partner Anastasia Panagakos for putting up with me (and all my cursing at the computer when Word would not print my figures correctly) while I was writing this dissertation. Much time that could have been spent with her was instead devoted to this dissertation, and I thank her for her understanding, support, and love. v Abstract As shown by cross-cultural studies, pottery-making is rare among mobile hunters and gatherers. Many factors, including the heaviness of pots, their susceptibility to breakage, small population size, and time and scheduling conflicts work against such groups to engage in pottery-making. In this regard, the late prehistoric hunter-gatherers of California and the Western Great Basin, who began making earthenware vessels some 500-700 years ago, are unusual. This dissertation seeks to understand why these Numic people began making and using pottery, and how the technology was embedded within the constraints of high residential mobility and a simple social organization. To address this question it was necessary to understand how pottery was used and produced. Five main analyses were undertaken. Chapter 3 surveys the ethnographic literature on California Great Basin pottery-making. Chapter 4 presents a technological study of whole pots and potsherd attributes. Chapter 5 analyzes the distribution of pottery in the study area across different ecological zones and valley systems. Chapter 6 examines pottery use more directly through Gas Chromatography- Mass Spectrometry analysis of organic residues in a sample of potsherds. Chapter 7 discusses an Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis of a large sample of potsherds to better understand the production and movement of ceramics. Results are manifold and show, first, that California and Great Basin pots are not crude and unsophisticated tools, as they are often described, but were modified to suit the constraints of particular environments and social systems. Second, pots are primarily associated with valley bottom locations and especially lakeside environments. Third, pottery was primarily used to process plant resources, particularly seeds and nuts. Fourth, pottery-making was organized on a small family- level or individual scale and vessels were rarely moved between valley systems. In the final analysis, I suggest pottery was adopted by women to resolve time and labor demands created by a diet increasingly focused on small seed resources and the need to feed and care for larger families. At the same time, I suggest that pots were an instrumental tool in the shift to a more privatized economy. Pots were an efficient tool for processing large volumes of small seeds.