An Analysis of Kalinga Technology

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This grant permits Dr. Longacre to return to Northern Luzon in the Phillipines to continue research among the Kalinga people. The Kalinga are a "traditional" group in which both pottery and basketry is locally produced. With the help of both U.S. and Phillipino assistants Dr. Longacre will continue his work to learn how material objects are produced, used and finally discarded. In particular, he will continue to follow a population of over 2,000 pots in use and through household inventories to obtain an accurate picture of just how long pots last. He will also undertake detailed studies of the surface alteration of pottery which results from use and make a substantial collection of "used" pots for research and teaching. This pottery project is an outgrowth of prior NSF supported research. Dr. Longacre will also begin a basketry study which is important because while women produce pottery, baskets are made by men. Thus it will be possible to compare male.female differences in production. Although the team is working with living people, the goal of this research is archaeological. Because potsherds are well preserved they are often recovered in archaeological contexts and in many sites constitute the majority of the excavated finds. From these archaeologists must make inferences about the people who made them, and unless one knows how pottery is produced and how it functions in a society this can be extremely difficult to do. In this project the study of use wear should make it possible to infer the uses to which particular vessels were put. Through study of breakage rates it should be possible, on the basis of archaeologically recovered remains, to determine the number of total pots in the population.