Doctoral Dissertation Improvement Award: Investigation of Archaeological Communities of Practice

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The goal of this doctoral dissertation project is to understand the impact of colonialism on the daily activities of Native Americans and their response to the rapid changes that took place after European contact. Because most historical documents about this region were written by men, the experience of Native American women has been neglected. This project addresses this disparity by focusing specifically on one of the products of the everyday activities of women and the importance and stability of the networks of learning that developed among women around the practice of pottery production. This project emphasizes the stability of these communities and the choices made by female potters to demonstrate that these women were agents of change and to counter dominant narratives that depict Native Americans as passive victims of an unstoppable colonial force. From a theoretical perspective, this work improves researchers’ understandings of how working groups of individuals - in this case traditional potters - are maintained in the face of significant political and social change. These issues will be addressed through the analysis of pottery from four cultural sites located in coastal Georgia and South Carolina. The doctoral student will utilize visual inspection of pottery decoration and attributes related to production. Similarities and differences in these traits will allow her to identify sites that were occupied by potters who likely learned to produce pottery together or spent significant amounts of time engaged in pottery production together. She will also utilize petrographic microscopy for a more detailed look at how production processes vary between sites. The pottery samples have been selected specifically to allow researchers to address how the networks connecting women at the study sites changed or were maintained through time. Radiocarbon dating will be used to ensure that any variation that is observed is the result of differences in potting communities, rather than change through time. This research will be presented to the nearest descendants of the tribe in question, the Muskogee (Creek) Nation. This offers members of the tribe an archaeological perspective on their history and facilitate positive relationships between academic archaeologists and descendant communities.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.