Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community

Dean E. Arnold made ten visits to Ticul, Yucatan, Mexico, witnessing the changes in transportation infrastructure, the use of piped water, and the development of tourist resorts. Even in this context of social change and changes in the demand for pottery, most of the potters in 1997 came from the families that had made pottery in 1965. This book traces changes and continuities in that population of potters, in the demand and distribution of pottery, and in the procurement of clay and temper, paste composition, forming, and firing.

In this volume, Arnold bridges the gap between archaeology and ethnography, using his analysis of contemporary ceramic production and distribution to generate new theoretical explanations for archaeologists working with pottery from antiquity. When the descriptions and explanations of Arnold’s findings in Ticul are placed in the context of the literature on craft specialization, a number of insights can be applied to the archaeological record that confirm, contradict, and nuance generalizations concerning the evolution of ceramic specialization. This book will be of special interest to anthropologists, archaeologists, and ethnographers.

Dean E. Arnold is an adjunct curator in the Negaunee Integrated Research Center/Social Sciences at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and professor emeritus of anthropology at Wheaton College in Illinois, where he taught for thirty-nine years. He has done fieldwork in Peru, Mexico, Bolivia, Guatemala, and the Southwest; authored six books, including the seminal Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process; coedited two books; and published more than sixty articles about potters, pottery, and pottery production and related subjects (such as Maya Blue). Arnold was a Fulbright Scholar in Mexico and Peru, a visiting fellow at Clare Hall at University of Cambridge in 1985, and a visiting scholar at the Department of Archaeology there in 1985, 1992, and 2000. He received the Society for American Archaeology’s Award for Excellence in Ceramic Studies in 1996.