Deep Surfaces: Pottery Decoration and Identity in the Mission Period

Abstract

In the southeastern United States, many Native American societies invested iconographic meaning in the surface decorations incised or stamped on pottery. While some symbols represented cosmological concepts, others probably designated tribe, village, clan, or other social units. This is certainly true of groups that lived in La Florida, where, at contact, there were clear correlations between some Native American groups and pottery types. During the mission period, however, these associations became blurred. Variability diminished, and three pottery types dominated assemblages of utilitarian wares used by Native Americans and Spaniards. Heretofore, this stylistic turn of events was explained as the result of new allegiances and identities that emerged in the 1600s. It is argued here that, in the Southeast (as elsewhere), the market was responsible for some of this uniformity. Cosmological concepts present in the prehistoric variant of one of these types were retained for some time, however.