Integrating Archaeological Science and Social Theory to Gain a New

Insight into Iroquoian Ceramics

By Kostalena Michelaki, McMaster University
Paper presented at the Canadian Archaeological Association Meetings, Toronto, May 26th 2006

PLEASE DO NOT SITE WITHOUT PERMISSION FROM THE AUTHOR

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Ceramics vary: in shape, size, colour, texture, decoration. The interesting question of
course is why? What does this variation mean? and, in a more practical level, how can
we most accurately record it?
Some argue that ceramics vary in direct correlation to the ethnic groups who make them.
If culture refers to ideas shared by a people then ceramics are those ideas objectified.
We can, thus, create lists of traits that co-vary, defining clear taxa, which represent the
ideas shared by an equally clear ethnic group. Ceramics vary because the ideas of human
groups vary in time and space. And we can capture this variation by recording traits and
organizing them into types.
This has been a very influential approach in Ontario archaeology in the last 50 years.
Ceramics have been asked two main questions: what are the origins of the Iroquoian
speakers, and what is the timing of their becoming the ethnographically known people we
read about in the Jesuit Relations. The arguments about the value of studying types or
attributes, about in-situ developments, migration or both vary, but in the end ceramics are
used to build chronologies, situate a site in an existing ethno-chronological taxonomy,
or track the movements of particular ethnic groups in space and time.
In this paper I use the shell-tempered pottery that appears in Neutral villages, to point out
how, by integrating archaeological science and social theory we can ask ceramics new
questions, and find more nuanced answers for existing ones.
Lennox and Fitzgerald point out that this shell-tempered ceramic assemblage is a western
influence, originating from the Algonquian Western Basin peoples of the Toledo-DetroitChatham region (Lennox and Fitzgerald 1990). Jamieson refers to it as Upper
Mississippian influenced, but nonetheless indigenously made (Jamieson 1992). It
appears throughout the Neutral sequence, but there is a temporal and spatial pattern in its
distribution. The idea is that in the 15th and very early 16th century we only find traces of
it in western sites, such as Lawson and Pound, as their inhabitants initiated or continued
hostilities with a group further west. With time this conflict intensified as the Neutral
expanded westwards, and thus in Wolfe Creek and McGeachy 17 % of the body sherds
are shell-tempered. The people at most westerly sites likely joined in late prehistoric
migration into Historic Neutralia to become inhabitants of the Spencer/Bronte Creeks site
cluster, continuing their western forays. At the Christianson site, between A. D. 1600 and
1630, 14% of the body sherds are shell-tempered. At the Hamilton Village, immediately

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afterwards, 64% are shell-tempered, documenting increased hostilities between the

particular Neutral Group and the Fire Nation. Between 1638 and 1641 the Neutral are
known to have brought home more than 1000 Fire Nation captives, primarily women and
children. Since contemporary nearby sites have very small amounts of shell-tempered
pots, the idea is that the majority of hostages were restricted to a few sites.
The issues addressed through the presence of shell-tempered ceramics are large-scale
important questions of interaction, enculturation and culture change. Large-scale
processes, such as Mississippification, though happen on the ground through the rather
small-scale decisions and actions of individuals who go about their everyday lives. Let us
think then how these shell-tempered pots came to be in Neutral villages.
According to our current understanding, for more than two centuries and for at least six
generations of people, shell-tempered pots are known to Neutral groups. They are not
known only as foreign pots that arrive complete in their villages. They are not supposed
to be trade items; Neutral men do not bring them back from their raids as symbols of
bravery; and captive women do not carry along their household pots. It seems that six
generations of Neutral women at least witnessed Fire Nation women making shelltempered pots at their villages, quite possibly in their own longhouses. And for two
centuries not even one Neutral potter made a shell-tempered pot? Not a single Fire Nation
captive made a grit pot? So much so that we can count percentages of shell-tempered
body sherds and know which sites had more captives and which ones had less?
Even if that is the case for the first generation of captives, what happens to these women
down the line? As villages move and initial captives are integrated into village life, what
do they teach their daughters and granddaughters? Do they teach them to make shelltempered pots? If they do, higher percentages of shell-tempered pots in later villages
would not necessarily mean increased hostilities. OR do they teach them to make grittempered pots, in which case shell-tempered sherd percentages and the presence of Fire
Nation women in Neutral villages would not have an evident one-to-one relationship.
So, going back to why pots vary, it seems that ethnicity, time and space do not provide
an adequate answer. Another approach had pointed out that ceramics are not objectified
ideas; they are tools. If culture is mans extrasomatic means of adaptation then people
use ceramics as tools to adapt to their natural and social environments. Pots vary because
they fulfil different utilitarian and social functions. And we record that variation by
identifying the attributes that are utilitarian and technical in character, responsible for the
functional and mechanical variation of pots, and those that are unrelated to function and
mechanics and thus bear the burden of social variation.
So, the question becomes, Which attributes are functional, and which ones are social?
Physical properties of the ceramic material affect a vessels suitability for various uses.
Variables such as the raw materials and their characteristics, wall thickness and surface
finish can affect a vessels permeability important for storage containers - thermal
conductivity central in cooking or strength and thermal stress resistance, which in
turn affect ceramic longevity.

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What is the functional story of the shell-tempered pots? It is worth looking at the
literature on the function of Mississippian pots, if this is where the practice originated.
Steponaitis (Steponaitis 1984) considered the entire prehistoric ceramic sequence in westcentral Alabama, leading up to and including Mississippian ceramics from Moundville.
He focused on how the paste composition of cooking vessels changed through time and
showed three major shifts: from coarse sand to fine sand, from fine sand to coarse grog,
which is crushed pottery, and from coarse grog to coarse shell. He argued that these shifts
represent increased resistance of cooking vessels to thermal stress. Grog, unlike sand,
expands in the same rate as clay. As the vessel is subjected to repeated cycles of heating
and cooling, expanding and contracting, grog reduces the risk of cracking and thus
prolongs the pots successful life. Pre-fired shell has the same expansion rate as the clay,
but also added benefits. Being platy in shape its particles get easily oriented within the
pots wall. Using finishing techniques such as paddle and anvil, the particles can get more
compacted than those of grog. This makes the walls stronger and thinner, and as Braun
has shown Other things being equal, the thinner a wall, the higher its thermal
conductivity. (Braun 1983).
In other words, shell-tempered pots are superior cooking pots, especially for starchy
foods, such as maize. Braun argues, that the palatability and digestibility of starchy seeds
can be enhanced by cooking them to the point of gelatinization in a liquid broth, which
requires long cooking times and high temperatures, making boiling the most efficient
form of cooking (1983: 118). Shell-tempered pots, being thinner and stronger, are best for
boiling. Thus, by A.D. 1000 Mississippian groups had established the best pottery
making technology for their cooking technology, in which boiling maize was central.
Which makes one wonder why in the process of Mississippification the Iroquoians would
choose to adopt maize, but not the superior pottery technology required for it to be
cooked. Even if maize had been adopted for reasons other than eating initially, why is it
that by the 15th century when they do eat it -, and for 2 hundred years when the Neutral
witnessed that technology, and must have noticed that shell-tempered pots cooked maize
more efficiently and lasted longer.. why did they still not adopt the practice?
This is the point where this approach falls apart. It assumes that functional constraints are
strict and the desire for efficiency is a given; that a technical choice cannot also be
symbolic and social. From a 21st century point of view, the Mississippian shift from grog
to shell makes perfect sense as a functionally inspired change. But why would a
Moundville woman decide that her well functioning grog-tempered cooking pot could
work even better and decide to look for shell as opposed to something else?
Choices must already make sense in an existing realm of appropriate options. Materials
do not only have mechanical properties. They have symbolic properties too. Lucy Lewis
daughters from the Acama Pueblo send kids to the Anasazi ruins nearby to bring back
sherds that they crush and add to their paste so that their pot can get spirit from their
ancestors. In Africa potters, when their mother dies, break her water jar and incorporate

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the pieces in their jar, so that her spirit continues. In Indonesia this recycling of pots and
souls continues today. In a lament we hear: If you had broken like an earthern dish, I
would dig you up again and bake you (Hoskins 1998).
Thus, explaining the shift from grog to anything else as simply the desire to get a stronger
pot is not enough. It is undeniable that shell was better for cooking, but it must have fit in
other ways too in the symbolically appropriate options of the Moundville potters. Maybe
it did not do so for the Neutral. Then again maybe shell-tempered pots have nothing to do
with Fire Nation captives and are instead a part of the typical Neutral assemblage, with a
special function. We do not know how people in Neutral villages made and used
ceramics and thus we cannot evaluate whether the shell-tempered pots represent a
different group, or a different function. And if we do not know the logic according to
which they made and used materials and objects, how can we understand what objects,
practices, or traits they chose to adopt and what to reject in their interactions with their
neighbours? How can we then understand what processes like Mississippification might
have actually involved?
Every person comes to life, grows and learns how to make things in a community with
pre-formed ideas about how the world works, how things should be made and what
resources, tools and techniques are appropriate. Every act of production, thus, is social
and exists in continuation with the past. Yet, in their every day practice, people modify
these rules even as they try to reproduce them, so that rules are never absolute and
individual action is never random.
Why do ceramics vary then? For reasons that are mechanical and functional and social
and traditional and personal. How can we study this web? Obviously we cannot look at a
finished object and a priori say these attributes are mechanical, these are functional and
these are socially relevant, since these qualities are indivisible. We must move beyond
objects and consider the whole operational sequence, understanding that at every stage a
human being is making a decision about how to proceed. Their decisions are material.
Potters have to meet real constraints to create successful pots. But for every constraint
there is always more than one way of meeting the challenge. Thus, the point is the choice,
not the constraint. Of all the possible solutions which one does the potter choose?
In a Neutral site we could begin by trying to understand what these choices had been
throughout the operational sequence. That sequence involves a number of stages, which
you can see on the slide, along with some of the lines of evidence we can pursue, and
some of the analytical techniques that allow us to see on the sherds themselves the effects
of the choices the potters had actually made.
If we found out that shell tempered pots were made with clays that were local, but
consistently different than those of grit-tempered pots, that they only included shell and
never grit, were shaped using distinct methods or combinations of methods, distinct
finishing and decorative techniques, that they were fired in ways different than those of
grit pots and used for equivalent functions, then we could not only say that the shell

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tempered pots were made by different people rather than having different uses but
also that the interaction between the two groups had been minimal.
Discovering such a pattern would be very interesting, but in reality, considering the
proximity the potters would have, I expect that the pattern would be more intricate.
Chances are that the two sequences would diverge and converge at different stages. The
fact that not all stages are expected to be equally variable highlights the necessity of
examining complete operational sequences and not just particular stages (Gosselain 1992,
1998, 2000; Livingstone Smith 2000).
For example, knowing that raw material choices affect the properties of the clay paste,
the performance of the finished product and are also symbolically important it follows
that potters learn them in a group early on. Ethnographically it is also shown that raw
material selection and preparation does not vary considerably throughout the productive
lives of potters. Thus, we could expect this stage to tell us a lot about group practices.
The same is true for the forming stage. It is very rare that potters change manufacturing
techniques throughout their lifetime. Forming is a stage that involves a lot of muscle
memory and it is again a fruitful place to look for group practices.
Decoration, on the other hand, is possibly the most individualistic and varying of all the
production stages and thus the least relevant when we attempt to understand group
dynamics and interactions. As Gosselain (1992, 1998, 2000) has observed about the
Cameroonian potters their designs seem to have more to do with their daily mood than an
overt expression of group affiliation or identity.
So, if we see the shell and grit sequences diverging in the raw materials and the forming
techniques, but converging in everything else we can imagine again two different groups
producing, but probably together, interacting with each other, copying things that are
easily copied and having communal firings. And if that was the case, then the reasons
why the Neutral did not adopt shell would have to be symbolic, given the superiority of
the performance of these pots in boiling.
Alternatively, if we saw the raw materials diverging, the forming methods converging,
finishing diverging and firing converging again then we could suspect that the
difference between shell and grit-tempered pots was functional, rather than due to the
existence of two distinct groups.
Knowing how many different manufacturing sequences were present in a village, we can
compare them to see whether some involved more steps, or more time consuming steps,
or steps that showed more control, suggesting more labour investment or greater skill.
We can then begin to understand the nature of the organization of production: how many
people were producing? How often? How many pots in a year?
When we combine the analytical strength of techniques borrowed from geology,
materials science and chemistry with the interpretive power of social theory we can

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explore group and individual dynamics in the context of small-scale daily activities.
When these activities are looked at over the long term, in a regional scale, they can reveal
a far more nuanced picture of regional interactions than the one we currently have.
The infrastructure and expertise for the analytical techniques is in our fingertips in places
like the McMaster campus, with facilities such as the newly CFI funded Centre for
Interdisciplinary Research on Archaeological Ceramics and the well-established
Brockhouse Institute for Materials Research and the McMaster Nuclear Reactor. The
holistic theoretical vision towards technology is becoming stronger as more applied
examples are being published from around the world. The shortly occupied Iroquoian
villages let us see what potters do almost one generation at a time. And finally, we do not
need more excavations. The material awaits in Museum, University and Cultural
Resource Management collections. I firmly believe that this small-scale approach can
give a breath of fresh air to Iroquoian archaeology, providing new ways to answer old
questions, adding new questions about the Iroquoian past and contributing significantly to
international research on human technological behaviour and the adoption of innovation.

References
Braun, D. P.
1983 Pots as Tools. In Archaeological Hammers and Theories, edited by J. A.
Moore and A. S. Keene, pp. 107-134. Academic Press, New York.
Gosselain, O. P.
1992 Technology and Style: Potters and Pottery among the Bafia of Cameroon.
Man 27:559-586.
1998 Social and Technical Identity in a Clay Crystal Ball. In The Archaeology
of Social Boundaries, edited by M. T. Stark, pp. 78-106. Smithsonian Institution
Press, Washington, D.C.
2000 Materializing Identities: An African Perspective. Journal of
Archaeological Method and Theory 7:187-217.
Hoskins, J.
1998 Biographical Objects: How Things Tell the Stories of People's Lives.
Routledge, New York.
Jamieson, S. M.
1992 Regional Interaction and Ontario Iroquois Evolution. Canadian Journal of
Archaeology 16:70-88.

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Lennox, P. A. and W. R. Fitzgerald

1990 The Culture History and Archaeology of the Neutral Iroquoians. In The
Archaeology of Southern Ontario to A.D. 1650, edited by C. J. Ellis and N. Ferris,
pp. 405-456. vol. Publication Number 5. Occasional Publications of the London
Chapter, Ontario Archaeological Society Inc., London, Ontario.
Livingstone Smith, A.
2000 Processing Clay for Pottery in Northern Cameroon: Social and Technical
Requirements. Archaeometry 42(1):21-42.
Steponaitis, V. P.
1984 Technological Studies of Prehistoric Pottery from Alabama: Physical
Properties and Vessel Function. In The Many Dimensions of Pottery: Ceramics in
Archaeology and Anthropology, edited by S. E. van der Leeuw and A. C.
Pritchard, pp. 79-127. Universiteit van Amsterdam, Amsterdam.

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