The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies ed. by William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes

Abstract

TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE Book Reviews 315 Valley, killing four hundred people. In response, California tight­ ened controls over all dam building by private companies. East­ wood’s structures were all intact, but after he died of a heart attack in 1924, no powerful voice remained to defend his legacy. Jackson surveys the others who carried on, but arch dams faded away by the end of the 1930s, not least because big-budget New Deal builders favored the monumental aesthetics of gravity dams. There was more than one possible “second nature.” In the decade that Jackson devoted to this work he appears to have examined every relevant archive and all of Eastwood’s dams. This solid, instructive, innovative, and well-constructed book de­ serves a wide readership. David E. Nye Dr. Nye, professor of American history at Odense University, received the 1993 Dexter Prize for Electrifying America. His most recent books are Consuming Power: A Social History ofAmerican Energies (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1997) and Narratives and Spaces: Technology and the Construction ofAmerican Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997). The Emergence ofPottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies. Edited by William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1996. Pp. xviii+285; illustra­ tions, maps, figures, tables, notes, index. $55.00 (cloth); $29.95 (paper). After decades of neglect, material culture and technology have risen recently to the forefront of sociocultural inquiry and interpre­ tation theory. Scholars have begun to explore in greater depth and in a wider interdisciplinary context the interdependence between material culture and society, matter and mind, and between technol­ ogy and human evolutionary processes. This volume of essays on the earliest appearance and development of pottery throughout the world provides a thought-provoking addition to the growing litera­ ture on the relationships between society and technology in varied historical and sociocultural contexts. Archaeologists today can reconstruct much more of the past than they could just a few years ago. Sophisticated new techniques of chemical, physical, and biological analysis in combination with re­ cent developments in archaeological methods and sociocultural in­ terpretation theory make available new kinds of data and new in­ sights into the nature of prehistoric societies. Pottery today is analyzed not only with reference to vessel shape and size or surface decoration to establish chronologies, typologies, and uncontextual­ ized sériations grounded primarily in visual analysis. With the aid of such methods as thermoluminescence dating and neutron-activa­ 316 Book Reviews TECHNOLOGY AND CULTURE tion analysis for trace-element analyses of clays, archaeologists may locate the vessels’ geographical sources and map their distribution to determine trade links and other forms of exchange and social interaction. Residues adhering to vessels or shards, too, are now ana­ lyzed along with shape and decoration to recover information on not only subsistence and quality of nutrition in early populations but also vessel function—i.e., whether it was used for storage, cook­ ing, ritual, or social display. Given the availability of these new data, the authors of these essays can ask and answer new questions about ceramic technology and the relationship of pottery to society and to sociocultural change over time. Seeking to address the “social factors” behind earliest pottery production and use, the editors state that their primary aim is “to deconstruct commonly held assumptions about prehistoric ce­ ramics” (p. 1). Collectively, the essays in this volume make a power­ ful statement on the importance of the individual case in historic time and space and the likely futility of seeking universal laws in human and social behavior. The book clearly drives home, for exam­ ple, the fact that the emergence of pottery can no longer be associ­ ated solely with the appearance of agriculture. Nor is it necessarily part ofa package that includes settled village life or social complexity or any other trait previously linked with the so-called Neolithic life­ style. Instead, pottery was developed and first used by seasonally mo­ bile populations of the late Upper Palaeolithic era, among hunters and gatherers of wild foods, and most likely among those reliant upon fish and shellfish food resources. The earliest pottery so far excavated in both Old and New World contexts...