Doctoral Dissertation: Ceramic Exchange and Technology in the Late Prehistoric Western Great Basin

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Under the direction of Dr. Michael Jochim, Mr. Jelmer Eerkens will collect data for his doctoral dissertation. Mr. Eerkens' goals are twofold. His is an archaeologist who has studied late prehistoric hunting and gathering peoples of the US Western Great Basin and he wishes to understand how such groups adapted to a harsh and unpredictable desert environment. He also plans to use ceramic data to understand how and to what extent it can serve useful analytic purposes. Because ceramics are both common and well preserved in archaeological sites, they constitute an important category and prehistorians study them from a number of perspectives to determine what light they may shed on past behavior. In prehistory most ceramics were made by agricultural peoples who resided in villages and larger social units and who lived a fairly settled existence. In such groups it has proven possible to use ceramics to reconstruct many aspects of social stratification, economic and political organization and inter group relations and thus they have proven a powerful tool. Very few prehistoric hunter and gatherer groups however manufactured ceramics and their scientific potential at this level of social organization has been little explored. During more recent periods of time however groups in the US Great Basin manufactured pottery, large samples of which have been recovered in the course of archaeological excavations. Because it is generally crudely made, undecorated and lacking in detailed stylistic characteristics relatively little attention has been paid to it.Mr. Eerkens will conduct chemical analyses of both potsherds and clay deposits from a number of Great Basin sites and regions. Trace element analysis will be employed to characterize deposits, to group sherds into chemically similar classes and to match sherds to raw material source. Lipid analysis will, hopefully, serve to determine the materials which such pots contained. On this basis it should be possible to trace the movement of both pottery and people across the landscape and to determine the nature of social relations between individual groups. It should also be possible to determine the extent to which pottery was traded for direct subsistence versus other purposes.This research is important for several reasons. It will provide new insight into a poorly understood period of US prehistory. It will help to develop methods of analysis useful in a variety of archaeological situations, shed new light on hunter and gatherer level social organization and finally assist in training a promising young scientist.