Doctoral Dissertation Research: Modeling Hunter-Gatherer Ceramic Production and Use: A Test Case From the Upper Texas Coastal Plain

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Larkin Hood, under the supervision of Dr. Benjamin Fitzhugh, will conduct a study of pottery made by prehistoric hunter-gatherer groups on the upper Texas coastal plain during the Late Prehistoric and Contact periods (600 A.D.-1700 A.D.). This research will clarify the role of pottery production and use among hunter-gatherers, and will provide a better understanding of the diverse roles pottery has played in prehistoric societies. Traditionally anthropologists have associated pottery production and use with the intensive food processing and storage tasks of sedentary societies who produce their own food. More recent hypotheses suggest that ceramic vessels function as tools to gain and maintain economic, social and political prestige. Archaeologists continue to document examples of pottery manufacture and use by relatively mobile groups with little social ranking who hunted and gathered wild game and plants. Yet the specific roles of ceramic containers in hunter-gatherer social and economic systems remain unclear, and previous hypotheses do not adequately explain why some hunter-gatherer societies make and use pottery. The upper Texas coastal plain is an ideal area for this study because it is home to a long-standing prehistoric record of pottery made and used by indigenous hunter-fisher-gatherers. Groups in this area appear to have maintained relatively egalitarian hunter-gatherer ways of life even as neighboring pottery-producing groups such as the Caddo began to cultivate domesticated plants, settle in villages, and create large earth monuments, and organize in social hierarchies. In order to determine the economic and social roles of pottery in upper Texas coastal plain, potsherds from three sites will be analyzed using the following methods: 1) analysis of scratches, pits, and other types of wear on over 5,000 potsherds to determine how food and other materials were processed in the vessels; 2) analysis of mineral inclusions (petrography) in the vessel bodies to detect how much people moved on the landscape; 3) analysis of organic residues absorbed in the vessel body to determine types of food resources the pots contained. In order to be certain that sites are comparable in age, potsherds will be dated using a thermoluminesence method.This research will increase our understanding of prehistoric life in the upper Texas coastal plain, an area currently supporting a dense human population which continues to significantly modify the landscape. The results of this research will be shared with the public via presentations to amateur archaeologists and school groups (e.g., Harris County Archeological Society, and the Houston Museum of Natural Science). The mission of federal and state agencies responsible for managing archaeological collections and sites (e.g., United States Army Corps of Engineers, State of Texas) will also be enhanced by information from this research about the ways prehistoric inhabitants of this region used the land and the artifacts that these agencies protect and curate. This research will not only contribute to the graduate training of the co-PI (Hood), but also to undergraduate and K-12 learning at the University of Washington, particularly in helping both college and middle school students better understand hypothesis testing, as well as to hone their laboratory analysis and scientific writing skills.