Journal of Archaeological Research, Vol 4, No.

2, 1996

Recent Ceramic Analysis: 1. Function, Style, and Origins

Prudence M. Rice 1

The recent literature on ceramic analysis, which has grown dramatically over the last 8 years, is reviewed in two articles. In this first article attention focuses on studies of function and use, stylistic analyses, and pottery origins. Functional analysis has been the most rapidly expanding segment of the field, particularly experimental, ethnoarchaeologica~ and residue analysis approaches. Stylistic analyses seem to be in a lull, following increasing dissatisfaction with information theory approaches. Questions of pottery origins are enjoying renewed interest and are briefly surveyed here. The second of the two articles will survey compositional investigations, pottery production, and approaches to "ceramic theory." Both reviews close with observations on current directions in ceramic studies.
KEY WORDS: pottery; analysis; function; style.

INTRODUCTION

Topical reviews such as this commonly open with a self-congratulatory introduction trumpeting the extraordinary expansion of recent research, and I see no reason to depart from this time-honored tradition: the field of ceramic analysis surely has to be one of the most rapidly growing sectors of archaeological and ethnoarchaeological inquiry in the last 25 years. However measured--whether by numbers of books and articles, numbers of researchers, or topics of study--ceramic analysis has been "expanding so fast that it [is] in danger of flying apart" (Orton et aL, 1993, p. 14).
1Departrnent of Anthropology, Mailcode 4502, Southern Illinois University, Carbondale, IL 62901. 133 1059-0161/96/0600-0133509.50/0O 1996PlenumPublishingCorporation

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Given this expanding universe, my task of surveying the recent literature in ceramic analysis is not an easy one. To accomplish it I have been forced to draw boundaries around my subject matter, boundaries that are inevitably somewhat artificial but nonetheless expedient. In order to delimit the subject matter for this review, I began by selecting 1987 as the beginning date for publications, choosing (albeit self-servingly) to appraise works that have appeared since what effectively constitutes for me an earlier synthesis, i.e., my book PotteryAnalysis (Rice, 1987). Second, I have generally chosen to omit studies that, in my judgment, address primarily site- or ware/type-specific concerns; I also have elected to leave out of this review theses, dissertations, and papers presented at meetings; and I have largely excluded publications in allied fields such as fine arts and ceramic engineering. Moreover, succumbing to my own scholarly interests and limitations, I focus primarily on general (especially methodological) and/or Americanist works (i.e., those treating the archaeology of the western hemisphere) and make no pretense of attempting thorough coverage of ceramics or ceramic studies throughout the entire world. The interested reader should consult Kolb (1989a) for another Slant on the field. Finally, the volume of literature on ceramic analysis has forced me--at the editors' behest--to divide this review into two separate articles. Given all these strictures, imposed from within and without, the present discussion concentrates on three "themes" or problem domains of continuing importance in pottery research--functional studies, stylistic analysis, and pottery origins. Other issues--compositional analyses, pottery production, and method and theory--are addressed in a forthcoming review. I conclude with observations of a more general nature on trends, cross-currents, and critique.

OVERVIEW By way of paving a path of entry into the subject, I begin with an overview of publishing trends. Perhaps the most salient observation to be made on recent pottery analysis highlights the contrast with earlier periods, when books or monographs on pottery focused on type descriptions or aesthetic studies, and technical analyses (if any) were relegated to appendices of archaeological reports. Today not only is pottery increasingly the subject of book-length manuscripts, but also highly specialized analyses are now accorded comparable scholarly esteem. It is necessary only to survey the torrent of books and monographs on pottery that have appeared since 1987 to appreciate just how much interest there is in ceramic analysis, especially in refining and improving methods.

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For example, three new books are general manuals on analytical procedures (Gibson and Woods, 1990; Orton et aL, 1993; Sinopoli, 1991) two are monographs addressed to ceramic function, specifically cooking vessels (Sassaman, 1993; Skibo, 1992a) two deal with general aspects of pottery production (D. Arnold, 1993; P. Arnold, 1991); three are broad historical or ethnographic overviews (Barley, 1994; Lister and Lister, 1987; Marken, 1994); two treat pottery style (Kaplan, 1994) or decorative imagery (ReentsBudet, 1994); and another covers myths associated with potters and pottery (Levi-Strauss, 1988). Of the numerous edited volumes published during the same interval, five are collections treating (to varying degrees) specific methods of ceramic analysis: Blakely and Bennett (1989) on publishing ceramic data, Biers and McGovern (1990) on residue analysis, Middleton and Freestone (1991) on ceramic petrology, Neff (1992) on ceramic chemical compositional analysis, and Smith (1994) on ceramic function. Among the others, one is devoted to the "emergence" of pottery (Barnett and Hoopes, 1995), two treat ceramic ethnoarchaeology (Longacre, 1991a; Longacre and Skibo, 1995), one covers ceramic production and distribution (Bey and Pool, 1992), another surveys the career accomplishments of Anna O. Shepard (Bishop and Lange, 1991), and five are more eclectic collections dealing with various aspects of pottery analysis and technology (Bronitsky, 1989; Kolb, 1988, 1989b, c; Kolb and Lackey, 1988). To these we must add edited proceedings of various national or international conferences held in the United States and abroad, which boast major sections on ceramics, including those from the Archaeometry meetings (e.g., Maniatis, 1991), the Materials Research Society meetings (Sayre et al., 1988; Vandiver et al., 1991, 1992), and the American Ceramic Society convention (Kingery, 1990; McGovern and Notis, 1989). There are, of course, other edited volumes--far too numerous to itemize here--that have chapters on ceramics included within the collection on broader topics. Even special issues of general archaeological journals occasionally have been devoted to ceramics (e.g., World Archaeology in 1989 and Archaeologia Polona in 1992). Many of the book-length contributions cited above are discussed, in whole or in part, in the topical surveys that follow. However, before these specific themes--i.e., function/use, style, characterization, etc.--are addressed, it is worth reviewing two of the recently published general manuals on ceramic analysis because they are very different in scope and thereby present distinct perspectives on the field. By virtue of the fact that both books were authored by non-Americanist specialists and, also, by virtue of what these volumes do and do not include within their covers, they establish a convenient context (and contrast) for my own discussion that follows.

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Carla M. Sinopoli's Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics (1991; for a review see Manson, 1992) is an introductory-level text for students, intended as a general overview of "some of the anthropological and historical questions we can ask of the past through ceramic analysis" (Sinopoli, 1991, pp. vii, 7). The book consists of eight chapters, plus an Appendix (on statistical techniques) and a Glossary; the chapters cover a wide range of topics including manufacturing techniques, classification, ethnoarchaeology, chronology, function, production and distribution, and inferences of social and political organization from pottery. To illustrate her points the author uses a case-study approach with examples drawn from Moundville, Alabama (on chronology; Chap. 4); New Mexico and India (on function; Chap. 5); the Near East, the midwestern United States, Netherlands, and India (on social systems; Chap. 6); and Oaxaca, Near East, and Peru (on production; Chap. 7). There is thus a good mix of New World and Old World examples, and archaeological and ethnographic contexts and data. Unfortunately, however, like many introductory texts, the volume may be criticized for being perhaps overly generalized, marked by spotty coverage and a reluctance to grapple with some of the complexities of analysis and interpretation. For example, the subject of style constitutes neither a chapter heading or subheading in the book nor an item in the Index, and ceramic engineering approaches to pottery--that is, analysis of use-related mechanical properties and relationships, and their interpretations--are largely ignored. (Yet an Index entry cryptically refers to "Electron microscope, classification systems and.") Complex theoretical issues such as the propositions concerning "standardization" and "diversity" as bases for inferring modes of pottery production are argued by assertion but fail to appear as entries in the Index or Glossary, nor are further readings suggested for these topics. This is peculiar given that standardization and diversity are major axes around which much discussion in current ceramic analysis revolves (see Part 2 of this review, forthcoming), particularly as these notions relate to research questions concerning socioeconomic organization and methodological issues of quantification of pottery. This notwithstanding, quantification is itself the subject of the book's useful 40-page statistical Appendix. A second recent methodological text, Pottery in Archaeology (Orton et al., 1993), is a triple-barreled volume both in authorship and in coverage. The book is divided into three sections: history and potential of ceramic analysis (two chapters), a guide to pottery processing and recording (seven chapters), and a survey of "themes" in ceramic studies (eight chapters). The contents of the chapters offer a very different--perhaps even skewed, to an Americanist viewpoint--orientation toward ceramic studies, and this can be seen in several ways.

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The introduction provides a valuable survey of the history of ceramic studies going back into the fifteenth century. Understandably, the emphasis is on European [especially British (see also Gibson and Woods, 1990)] contributions, many of which are published in French and German. For Americanists, this is a particularly valuable compendium, for it serves as an introduction to a literature with which many of us are unlikely to be familiar. This historical survey lends an unusual weighting to the book's Bibliography, for the references include 487 citations, of which 67 (nearly 14%) are titles dating prior to 1910. Correspondingly, despite the fact that the authors claim in the Preface (p. xv) that their references for each chapter were selected to "demonstrate the development of the topic and its current state of play," a relatively small proportion (ca. 13 percent) of them is dated 1987 or later. The first section of the book concludes with a cursory scan of four of what the authors call "parallel themes" in ceramic studies: ethnography, technology, scientific methods (dating, provenience, function), and quantification. To an Americanist it seems peculiar that there is no discussion of either style analysis or ethnoarchaeology among these "themes," and in the Index "ethnoarchaeology" and "style" entries each have only two citations. The chapters in Part III generally do not emphasize the kinds of anthropological questions that so preoccupy American archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists studying ceramics. Instead discussion proceeds more along the lines of a how-to manual on the mechanics of data massaging. The issues are largely those of yesteryear (i.e., seriation, chronology, data systematics) rather than those of processual (or post-processual) archaeology. There is, for example, substantial (and rather programmatic) attention to vessel shape classification and an entire chapter on issues of quantification; the emphasis is on assemblages, with rather brief commentary on ceramic function, production, and distribution. This distinctive view of ceramic analysis may be a consequence of two recent trends in British archaeology in general and pottery studies in particular. One is that "In the 1980s in Britain there was a move away from the presentation of actual data within archaeological reports" (Orton et al., 1993, p. 107), which led to a concern with formalizing standards of laboratory procedures and publication. A second trend is "the estrangement of pottery reports, and other specialist studies, from 'mainstream' archaeology," a separation that the authors blame (somewhat opaquely) on the expansion of "rescue archaeology" in the country during the preceding decades (Orton et aL, 1993, p. 24). Whatever the causes, if the view of Orton and his colleagues is any indication, British (and other) analysts seem to be confronting directly-though it is not clear whether by choice or circumstance--a problem that

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has long bedeviled archaeologists in this country, the euphemistically known "gray literature." They draw upon a volume entitled Analysis and Publication of Ceramics (Blakely and Bennett, 1989), whose contributors give a rather depressing assessment of their subject, registering concern about the costs of ceramic analysis and publishing, and calling for the establishment of standards to make analyses more widely useful to other scholars. The long-festering need for greater attention to both ceramic assemblage variation and analytical comparability are separate but related components of this preoccupation, and it erupts in different ways in different places. I return to this issue in Part 2 of this review.

FUNCTION AND USE Analysis of ceramic function and use certainly constitutes the most rapidly--even explosively--expanding subarea of the already burgeoning field of American pottery studies in the last few years. Why does functional analysis of pottery suddenly find itself so prominently in the spotlight? Several themes underlie this trend. Many researchers acknowledge an intellectual debt to Braun's (1983) seminal article propounding the viewpoint that pots can be analyzed as tools; another important pathbreaker was Bronitsky's (1986; Bronitsky and Hamer, 1986) call for greater application of materials engineering approaches to ceramic analysis. Taking a longer view, the current vogue can be tied to Frederick Matson's firm advocacy of the application of modem ceramic science to an understanding of ancient technologies [although Skibo (1992a, p. 3) doffs his cap to Matson in terms of "ceramic ecology"]. Irrespective of the trend's origins, reasons for the recent escalation of use-related analyses are perhaps best articulated by Skibo (1992a, pp. 4, 177): archaeologists place a heavy inferential burden on ceramics (in terms of retrodicting household size, prehistoric diet, trade patterns, learning networks, change, etc.), and it is difficult to investigate these issues until we better understand how pottery was employed in daily life. Functional analyses are particularly directed toward utilitarian, often undecorated (but cf. Kaplan, 1994), pottery, which has existed in abundance since the advent of the ceramic craft itself, continuously meeting humans' needs for varied containers for cooking, storage, serving, transport, etc. The objective of these studies, consequently, is on what might in an earlier day have been called "techno-function" rather than "socio-function" or "ideofunction." But within the general category of utility wares, functional analysis is most commonly and specifically focused on cooking vessels. Why has the humble cooking pot taken center stage?

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Ubiquity is one possible explanation: cooking pots are seemingly found in all times and places, even among hunter-gatherer groups (Reid, 1989; Sassaman, 1993), and in many places plain pottery is the only pottery available for study. Some question this emphasis, however: as DeBoer (1991, pp. 145, 147) comments, "... the fact that something exists in abundance does not guarantee the asking of interesting scientific questions" about it. It may be true that until recently archaeologists have rarely devised interesting questions to ask about plainware pottery. But cooking pots are utilitarian pots of a different stripe: The ability to create objects that can reliably withstand the physical (thermal and mechanical) strains of repeated heating and cooling of liquid and dry contents [see Reid (1989) for a fine treatment; see Stahl (1989) for general discussion of plant processing] raises larger questions of humans' development and mastery of technology and resources. And these issues carry an additional imperative, given known stresses on fuel supplies past and present. It matters little if these pots sometimes are not much to look at; their durability transcends the superficiality of image. The hegemony of the cookpot was boldly asserted nearly 20 years ago: The primary consideration of potters in making vessels is "to give suitable physical properties for cooking pots" (Rye, 1976, p. 119), and everything else is essentially epiphenomenal. Even earlier--some 50 years ago--Linton (1944) had explored patterns of variability in North American cooking pots, and it is no doubt significant that most of the technological analyses of these vessels continue to focus on those with a North American provenience. In this context, it is also important to note that in 1987 the Laboratory of Traditional Technology at the University of Arizona, home of many recent use/function studies, adopted the goal of understanding the performance characteristics of the cooking pot (Schiffer et al., 1994, p. 199). Functional analyses of pottery can be conceptualized and operationalized in several different ways. Perhaps the first distinction to be made is that between function and use (Henrickson, 1990, p. 84; Rice, 1990, pp. 1-2): "Function" refers to the broad roles or activities or capabilities of ceramics, for example as containers (for storage, processing, transport) or structural materials (e.g., bricks), while "use" refers to the specific way(s) in which a vessel was brought into service for a particular purpose. In the case of prehistoric and ethnographic pottery, attention is generally directed to container functions, and "use" may be conceptualized either in pot-centric "possibilist" terms (functions inferred from its thermal, mechanical, morphological, and physical properties) or in human-centric terms (empirical data on how people did use the pot). Regardless of the viewpoint taken, one category of evidence does not always or necessarily inform on any other. In addition, the evidence by

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which uses are studied may be direct or indirect. Many factors can intervene between the potter's initial ceramic "design concept" and the archaeologist's conclusions. Consequently analysts must phrase their observations with scrupulous care in order to distinguish among and between intended use (by the makers), actual use (in systemic context), final use (context of recovery), and inferred use (by archaeologists) of the pots in question. 'Actual use" is perhaps the most intransigent of these, because pots may have single or multiple uses (for example, vessels may serve only as water storage jars; or a vessel may serve as a water jar until its pores get clogged, after which it is employed in dry storage until it is accidentally broken at which time it becomes a flowerpot), and these uses may be identified nonspecifically (cooking) or specifically in terms of contents (boiling beans). One of the highlights of recent approaches to function is that virtually all of these factors are (or have been) at the forefront of analysis. The most abundant and varied approaches to archaeological analyses are those involving indirect evidence of use, yielding conclusions that must be phrased as "inferred uses." Early studies of ceramic function tended to dwell in this realm, and were based on fast and loose reasoning drawn from intuitive expectations, ethnographic analogies on the uses for which certain forms were deemed to be "best suited," and ceramic engineering (design principles based on high-fired industrial ceramics). Much of this work was based--explicitly or implicitly--on Linton's (1944, p. 370) earlier observations. The truism that "correlation does not prove cause" was often overlooked as simple functions were naively (but nonetheless confidently) asserted on the basis of use-related technological, mechanical, and morphological properties. One problem with the latter--use of morphological properties to infer function--is that analysis of these properties demands whole vessels and is difficult to operationalize from sherds. Judging from the relative infrequency of articles employing such approaches in the last six to eight years or so (e.g., Feathers, 1989; Henrickson, 1990; Smith, 1988, 1994), it may be that these oversimplified conjectures are ceasing to preempt research design, and archaeologists are now willing to square off against the real complexity of functional questions. More recent analyses of ceramic function have benefited from critiques of these earlier orientations, as it was acknowledged that use-related ceramic properties do not necessarily confirm potters' intentions. Potters' technical choices were elected not in a kneejerk response to desired performance but rather in a rich context of tradition, values, alternatives, and compromises. Rands' (1988) thoughtful evaluation of "least-cost" ecological principles (see, e.g., Arnold, 1985; also Zubrow, 1992) vs. the "functionoptimizing" engineering models of ceramic production and use is a good example (see also Brown, 1989; Woods, 1986). The hallmark of today's ap-

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proaches is careful testing and evaluation of behavioral correlates of use (direct rather than indirect evidence) and hypotheses concerning use-related properties, specifically as they pertain to low-fired earthenware. Methodologically, they have concentrated on a three-pronged attack (see Skibo, 1992a, b) via experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and physical sciences. In principle, if not in fact, then, we now know considerably more about how prehistoric cooking pots may have done their jobs.
Experimental Studies

Under the direction of Michael Schiffer, a formidable array of properties related to the function of cooking pots (and less frequently, water storage pots) has been investigated experimentally, as the variables that control these properties in a ceramic were manipulated in a laboratory setting (Schiller, 1990a, b; Schiller et al., 1994). Not surprisingly, given that cooking pots were the primary subject, the most effort was directed to variables affecting thermal properties. The attribute receiving greatest attention is surface treatment, both interior and exterior; variants considered included texturing (deep and shallow), slipping, polishing, smudging, fingersmoothing, and resin-coating. In addition, temper (particularly fiber versus mineral additives) also was analyzed. One relationship that has undergone considerable scrutiny concerns that between exterior surface texturing and thermal response, including heating effectiveness, cooling effectiveness, and thermal shock resistance (crack propagation, spalling). It has commonly been assumed that surface texturing increases the surface area of the pot that is exposed to the cooking fire and so augments heating effectiveness by accelerating the rate of heating. Several experimental studies have suggested that this may not be true, however. One investigation, using experimentally produced corrugated bowls and jars, revealed that exterior surface texturing increased neither the heating nor cooling rates (Young and Stone, 1990). Another (Schiffer, 1990a) suggested that for heating effectiveness, interior surface treatments are more important than exterior, because they modify permeability (i.e., the penetration of liquid into the vessel wall). Exterior surface treatments, on the other hand, are believed to respond to thermal shock resistance: Experiments suggested that "deep texture" exterior treatments, such as striations 1-1.5 m m deep or corrugation, conferred heightened thermal shock resistance (Schiffer et al., 1994, p. 210). Characteristics of water-storage vessels--specifically the effectiveness of evaporative cooling--also have been investigated by experiment. The findings are equivocal. One experiment suggested that interior surface

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treatment had little effect on the property, although "Vessels with more permeable exterior surfaces [including textured surfaces] ... were able to maintain lower water temperatures ... through greater water toss ..." (Schiller, 1990b, pp. 124, 127). These findings are contradicted in another experiment using corrugated pots, however (Young and Stone, 1990). Additional complex considerations must be taken into consideration, and these, combined with the ambiguous findings, reveal why cooking pots rather than water-storage pots have been the focus of attention in these experimental studies. For example, because evaporative cooling effectiveness is strongly affected by "factors such as air temperature and wind velocity that the potter and pot user cannot completely control," performance characteristics of water storage pots are not as directly determined by the potter's technical choices (Schiffer, 1990b, p. 133). In archaeological contexts, variations in the paste and exterior surface treatment of water-storage jars may be expected to vary from region to region, but within a region they would be expected to change little through time "because the local environmental conditions affecting evaporation rate remain largely constant" (Schiffer, 1990b, p. 134). Such changes that do take place would result from "alterations in use behaviors such as mode of transport, frequency of use, and mode of tilling and removing water" (Schiffer, 1990b, p. 134), The ambiguities in all of this have been acknowledged by the principal investigator, who concedes that the causes underlying some of these relationships are "unclear" and the results are "untidy" (Schiffer et al., 1994, pp. 207, 209). In addition, there is a bit of ingenuousness here: "thermal shock resistance is affected by exterior surface treatments as well as by firing temperature, paste characteristics, wall thickness, vessel shape and size, and interior surface treatment" (Schiller et aL, 1994, p. 211). Okay, then, so what is it not affected by? With such a multiplicity of variables affecting multiple properties, can inferences be confidently drawn concerning functional design of prehistoric pottery? Before archaeologists skeptically conclude that there are no clear, consistent, and predictable relationships between surface texturing and thermal behavior (heating and cooling effectiveness), or that exterior surface treatments are merely "stylistic" flourishes, they need to remind themselves of several points. First, the findings of these studies are valid for the experimental conditions under which the tests were performed, and the degree to which they hold true for any particular prehistoric assemblage has not been adequately tested or determined yet. Concerns were registered about the validity of the experimental conditions in early ceramic tests: Experiments were often conducted on flat test tiles or bars or on miniature vessels, created from industrially standardized clays and fired with a one-hour soak.

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How comparable are these test conditions to the use conditions of large, curved-contour pots made of "natural clays"? Many of these early criticisms have been answered in subsequent experiments, which are now commonly carried out on "life-size" replicated vessels, for example. [See Feathers (1989) for a thorough critique of procedures and reporting of an earlier (Bronitsky and Hamer, 1986) experimental analysis of ceramic performance.] Second is the question of intentionality: the fact that this or that design decision (e.g., corrugated surfaces) affects a use-related property (thermal behavior) in a certain way under experimental conditions does not prove that potters intentionally chose to make the pots with that attribute in order to select for that property. Rather it establishes a field of possibilities, possible choices and compromises that a potter could have elected in creating a pot. In light of this "ceramic possibilism," the relationships explored in laboratory experiments suggest a number of questions that can and should be explored in the context of prehistoric pottery assemblages. For example, if "deep texturing" controls thermal shock resistance rather than heating effectiveness, we might ask if it is found primarily in pottery with compositional or morphotechnological characteristics that lead to susceptibility to thermal shocking. Or is its occurrence a reflection of the clay and temper resources that were available and used? Or were the potter's choices made in spite of better resources available? Could potters' concerns about thermal behavior relate to the vessel's behavior during drying and firing, rather than during use? Which has primacy in design, decisions about interior or exterior surface treatments? Additional issues come to mind: Do these experimental findings about exterior surface texturing (corrugation via coiling) in the American Southwest also hold true for surface treatments in the southeastern United States, where complicated-, simple-, and check-stamped (also cord-, net-, and cob-marked, etc.) surfaces were created by beating the exterior of the pot with a paddle or stick? This manufacturing procedure introduces another variable, compaction and densification of the paste by repeated paddling, which could conceivably affect thermal properties. To my knowledge, this has not yet been tested.
Residue Analysis

A second, increasingly important approach to ceramic use is that of residue analysis (see Biers and McGovern, 1990; Skibo, 1992a, Chap. 3). The importance of residue analysis is that, other than finding a pot with

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its contents surviving intact, this is the only approach by which archaeologists can identify what was actually contained in prehistoric pottery (i.e., its specific uses). Residues of interest may be found on vessel surfaces (especially interior surfaces, and especially if contents were charred) or contained within the pores (absorbed residues). Analysis of carbon deposits and sooting draws inspiration from early studies by Hally (1983, 1986) and there have been few major developments or revelations since (see Skibo, 1992a, Chap. 7). Carbon residues are usually the first evidence that functional analysts seek in order to determine whether the vessel(s) of interest was used over a fire (and hence for cooking, presumably). Patterns of distribution of the soot and other discolorations also are informative as to how the pot was placed relative to the fire, i.e., in or over it. Thus study of carbon deposits provides nonspecific indicators of use, and other data are needed to specify the individual foodstuffs that may have been boiled, steamed, toasted, etc. Study of nonsoot residues in or on pottery builds on a variety of chemical analyses with a history dating back several decades [see Heron and Evershed (1993) for technical discussion of methods and Fankhauser (1994) for detailed procedures; papers referenced below also include summaries of procedures and applications]. While the application of these techniques to ceramic problems is still fairly uncommon among Americanist archaeologists, residue analysis has enjoyed considerable popularity in Europe, particularly in identifying the contents (wine, olive oil) of Mediterranean transport amphorae (e.g., Beck et aL, 1989; Heron and Pollard, 1988). Even so it continues to be described as "a difficult procedure and hardly routine" (R6ttlander, 1990, p. 40). Surface as well as absorbed residues are most commonly analyzed by chromatographic methods, which exist in a number of variants including thin layer and high-performance chromatography, gas chromatography, and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (Heron and Evershed, 1993, pp. 263-265). These methods are useful for a variety of resins, lipids (discussed below), and other substances as well. High-pressure liquid chromatography was used to identify theobromine and caffeine in a series of scrapings from Early Classic Maya tomb vessels; this resulted in a determination that the vessels had held cacao, a finding confirmed by decipherment of glyphs on one of the pots (Hall et al., 1990). Chromatographic methods are the "preferred techniques for the analysis of lipid extracts" (Heron and Evershed, 1993, p. 264). The term "lipids" refers to a large class of extractable natural components of biological organisms that includes alcohols, fatty acids, sterols (e.g., cholesterol), terpenes, and waxes found in some plant leaves. Fatty acids, for example, are represented by solid fats from animal materials and liquid oils from plants

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[see Fankhauser (1994, Table 11.1) for discussion of various types of fatty acids and their occurrence]. While the presence of these materials in a pottery sample is assumed to be a consequence of their having been part of the vessel contents at some time, the means by which they are preserved in vessel walls is not precisely known:
...When foodstuffs such as vegetable and meat products are boiled in water a proportion of their component fats, oils and waxes will be mobilised and float to the surface, and some of the liquefied materials is likely, on contact with the walls (generally, the internal surface of the vessel), to seep into the pores of the ceramic. The exact mechanism of incorporation of lipid into a vessel and the subsequent entrapment which serves to preserve the lipid, albeit in a degraded state, are not yet fully understood. (Charters et aL, 1993, p. 218)

The identification of different kinds and percentages of these acids in a residue can indicate different kinds of plants (e.g., cruciferous) or animals (marine animals; ruminants) that had been contained in the vessel (Deal and Silk, 1988; Rtttlander, 1990, pp. 38--39). All of these components are identified in an analysis by means of comparison with a "library" of reference standards. The "library" in the laboratory at TiJbingen, Germany, for example, includes a reference data set for 220 known lipids, including not only "recent material such as sunflower oil, butter, pork lard, or rare plants, but also ancient material, as, for example, 2000-year-old pork grease, 5500year-old linseed oil, or even much older mammoth fat" (R6ttlander, 1990, p. 38). Fankhauser (1994, pp. 242, 244) discusses some considerations in preparing laboratory standards of amino acids and fatty acids. Surface residues also may be analyzed by other methods. One is based on stable isotopes, specifically carbon/nitrogen ratios (e.g., Deal, 1990; Deal et al., 1991, Hastorf and DeNiro, 1985; Sherriff et aL, 1995); additional techniques include infrared spectroscopy [described as being of limited utility (Heron and Evershed, 1993, p. 262)], nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy [including the variant known as "13C cross-polarization magic-anglespinning NMR" (Sherriff et aL, 1995)], and pyrolysis. An unusually broad study employed inductively coupled plasma spectrometry to analyze 17 elements in encrustations on prehistoric vessels from western New York (23 samples), as well as samples of soils (61) and crops (corn; 28) from nine sites, in order to determine whether the foods processed in the pots were locally produced or imported (Fie et al., 1990). Phosphorus is another element that has been analyzed in pottery residues as a basis for inferring use (see Bollong et aL, 1993). Several studies, however, have concluded that it provides at best a nonspecific indicator of use because phosphorus is present in all plants and animals (Heron and Evershed, 1993, p. 261). An even more cautious view is that phosphorus in pottery is a consequence of the depositional environment, since soil

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phosphate is highly mobile and is easily adsorbed onto clays, especially in the case of low-fired, porous pottery (Dunnell and Hunt, 1990; Freestone et al., 1994). Residue analysis is not without perils. Because these techniques are still in a nascent stage with respect to archaeology, difficulties in application and interpretation are only beginning to be dissected. As in many other cases of application of technical analyses to archaeological pottery, the first limitations to be resolved are technical ones, and archaeological (cultural/behavioral) complications are taken up belatedly. One serious hindrance is the fact that the substances of interest may suffer decomposition or alteration through time (e.g., "auto-oxidation," hydrolysis, biological decay) or contamination from soil components or handling by the analyst. There has been considerable discussion of the circumstances under which these conditions occur [wet environments, elevated cooking temperatures, etc. (see Deal and Silk, 1988; Heron and Evershed, 1993, pp. 251-256; R6ttlander, 1990). The three "basic" amino acids (histidine, lysine, and arginine) are said to be most readily altered and, so, should be omitted from amino acid profiles (Fankhauser, 1994, p. 242). Not surprisingly, contamination seems to pose more of a problem for analysis of surface as opposed to absorbed residues. Problems with archaeological applications include improper handling (deposition of free amino acids [natural oils] from human hands), the fact that these techniques are usually applied to only a very small number of sherds, and the desirability of approaching questions of vessel contents from multiple analytical perspectives (Heron and Evershed, 1993, pp. 270-272). One study has indicated thai extracts taken from pottery pores (absorbed residues) are more informative than those from surfaces. This is true in part because of the reduced danger of contamination but also because "it is [usually] the cooking water extract which is absorbed into the matrix and not a mixture of extract and whole food" (Fankhauser, 1994, pp. 239-240). Boiled foods release free amino acids into the cooking water and the amino acid prone of this liquid can vary "considerably'--usually being higher--compared to that of the whole food. Issues of sampling contribute another set of questions: one provocative study comparing lipid content from rim, body, and basal portions of 62 vessels showed differential accumulation and preservation of lipid in different parts of a single pot (Charters et aL, 1993; see also Fanldaauser, 1994, p. 240). There may be a relationship between the distribution of lipid in a vessel and the vessel form, and furthermore, these variations may provide a basis for identifying not only specific vessel uses (in the sense of contents) but also mode of use (e.g., roasting, sealants, etc.) (Charters et al., 1993, pp. 221-222). Researchers interested in interpreting vessel use will continue

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to be plagued, however, by the inescapable fact that cooking vessels often had multiple contents and were employed in multiple food preparation events (see Skibo, 1992a, pp. 96-97). Ethnoarchaeological Studies: Attrition and Use It has been argued that a major contribution of ethnoarchaeological studies of pottery function lies in the area of "use-wear" or "use-alteration." This approach is based on painstaking documentation of the uses of a pot in the daily life of a household, coupled with analysis of specific indicators of those uses as they can be identified on vessel surfaces. Early studies were often directed toward pottery "use-life" and estimates of the time-toreplacement of vessels of different sizes and/or frequencies of use, an interval that is obviously important for understanding archaeological site formation processes (see Mills, 1989). The major conclusion to result from this work appears to be that "the smaller the vessel, the shorter its use-life" (Longacre, 1991b, p. 7). More recent studies have been directed toward other objectives, however. One of the most thorough of these is James Skibo's Pottery Function (1992a; for a review see Neff, 1994), which combined an ethnoarchaeological study of pottery use in a Kalinga community in the Philippines with several experimental approaches to use. The goal of his study was to generate material-behavioral correlates of ceramic use, and he acomplished this by analysis of visible traces of use alteration processes and activities such as accretion (deposits and residues; discussed below) and attrition (chiefly mechanical abrasion, but also nonabrasive attrition such as spalling). Attrition--defined as "the removal or deformation of ceramic surfaces" (Skibo, 1992a, p. 105)--results from activities such as stirring, scraping, turning the pot, and washing it. Abrasion traces could be linked to some specific use activities: vegetable/meat pots had greater abrasion on the interior neck because of stirring with metal utensils, while interior thermal spalls occurred primarily on rice-cooking pots (Skibo, 1992a, pp. 107, 132, 134). Of the three categories of use-alteration traces studied, attrition was felt to be the most robust inferentially because it can potentially inform about all components of the pottery use activities analyzed (Skibo, 1992a, p. 179). Comment and Critique The findings of today's approaches to ceramic function are technical and often contradictory; in addition, they are so voluminous and so recent

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that they have not yet been thoroughly digested and critiqued. Any attempt at distillation at this juncture is likely to be premature, but nonetheless, a few observations might be noted. One point concerns the relation between surface treatment and use/function. It is not too difficult to grasp the principle that vessel interiors and exteriors respond to different performance needs (Schiffer et aL, 1994). But how potters may have coped with those different demands is only now beginning to be investigated. With respect to interiors (of cookpots), it appears that the property that may be most important is permeability: interior surface treatment can lower permeability, and that in turn improves heating effectiveness (Schiffer, 1990a, p. 380). On the other hand, interior surface treatment of water jars appears to have had little discernible influence on evaporative cooling (water temperature or loss) (Schiffer, 1990b, p. 127). With reference to exteriors, while folk wisdom suggested that textured surfaces increase heating effectiveness, experimentation has suggested instead that the property most affected by exterior texturing is thermal shock resistance. Archaeologists tend to devote a great deal of energy to examining exterior surfaces but the findings of recent studies seem to be suggesting that we should pay equivalent--perhaps far more--heed to vessel interiors. Just as interior surface treatments are informative as to use, so are studies of use-alteration traces. Many such traces can be recovered on archaeological vessels, including deposits and residues and attritional traces (spalls, scratches), and often those on the interiors are more informative than those on the exterior (see Skibo, 1992a).

STYLE In contrast to the mushrooming subfield of functional anal3~ses of pottery, stylistic studies seem to be languishing in a period of desuetude. As noted, style was all but ignored in two recent general manuals on ceramic analysis. Nonetheless, several excellent reviews of style analysis in archaeology have appeared recently [Hegmon, 1992; Plog, 1995; see also Kaplan (1994) for a reworked stylistic analysis of Mexican "folk" pottery]. In addition, three 1985 symposia on style have been turned into two substantial edited volumes (Cart and Neitzel, 1995a; Conkey and Hastorf, 1990). Thus the recent lull may be more apparent than real, and simply a period of stock-taking. Historically, ceramic stylistic analysis has been marked by escalating competition among alternative viewpoints. During the 1970s and 1980s the literature was filled with the heady findings of the "ceramic sociologists"

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as they decoded learning frameworks and interaction patterns from design elements. There followed a series of critiques and competing methodologies, the most influential of which--or perhaps its practitioners were simply the most voluble--was the "information exchange" theory of Wobst (1977). Other approaches included the popular design structure analysis as well as the poorly received symmetry analysis, whose seemingly short, unhappy life actually dates back to the early 1940s [see Canouts (1991) for a sympathetic but realistic evaluation of Anna Shepard's early contributions). Recent literature on style analysis of pottery provides evidence of continuity of these trends, while also hinting at several new and different currents.
Recent Trends

Much of the recent ceramic style literature focuses on a critique of Wobstian information theoretic approaches. This was entirely expectable, of course: as soon as any one theory comes to have a significant impact on a field researchers unleash a volley of attacks in order to debunk it. Consequently, in the last decade or so there has been a lot of effort devoted to rejecting Wobst's ideas ... and it must be remembered that the initial enthusiasm for this orientation was itself part of the earlier anti-ceramic sociology movement. The anti-Wobst critique is summarized by Hegmon (1992, pp. 520, 521), who comments that two specific points have been most disputed: that only simple messages are transmitted stylistically and that messages differ depending on visibility and context (private or public). Sterner (1989, p. 451), in fact, notes that in a personal communication to Nicholas David, Wobst claimed to no longer hold these views, but he has not provided any synthetic overview of applications of his ideas that were earlier so influential. Second, in what is probably a very healthy--and long overdue--perspective, decoration of pottery is increasingly interpreted within a broader realm of stylistic behavior in general, or in "multiple media" rather than in isolation (Hegmon, 1992, p. 531). Styles of calabashes (e.g., Hodder, 1991), "[F]lattened heads, tattooed skin, [and] embellished weapons" (DeBoer, 1990, p. 87, see also DeBoer, 1991), and textiles, masks, and basketry (see papers in Cart and Neitzel, 1995a) all need to be investigated and intercompared in order to develop an interpretive context. Third, as a corollary to the notion that styles of ceramics are ceasing to be studied as isolated expressions, pottery researchers are increasingly melding stylistic analyses into other methodological endeavors. For example, ceramic style--once the purview of the archaeologist counting deco-

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rative elements within types--is now being investigated by ethnoarchaeologists looking for "meanings" of styles, i.e., their roles in expressing social relations. Decorative styles also are integrated with (or incorporated into) interpretation of chemical compositional analyses, as, for example, the sumptuously illustrated study of Classic Maya polychrome vessels (ReentsBudet, 1994) and analyses of Aztec pottery (Hodge and Minc, 1991, 1993). These reveal different geographical distributions of ceramics that have distinctive paste compositions as well as decorative motifs and styles. The apparent isomorphism of prehistoric styles and production units is an exciting development for archaeologists in Mesoamerica. Finally, studies of styles are increasingly accompanied by plaintive questions, sometimes running prominently in the titles of articles--"Why decorate a pot?" (Braun, 1991); "Who is signalling whom?" (Sterner, 1989)--and other times in the text: "... why [is] so much pottery ... plain and why some pottery is decorated" (DeBoer, 1991, p. 144); "Why, in this particular social and historical context, would ceramic motifs have been sociopolitically meaningful to and symbolically deployed by the Bushmen hunter-foragers?" (Conkey, 1989, p. 1500). If, as widely agreed, style is "a way of doing," then it is appropriate to ask, "What, if anything, does style do?" (Hegmon, 1992, p. 518). The fact that such fundamental queries continue to be posed indicates that they have not been satisfactorily answered, despite the pronouncements of other researchers who claim to have discovered "why pots are decorated" (David et at, 1988). Such claims at comprehension are usually context-based, although some authors (e.g., Braun, 1995; Hill, 1985) have used evolutionary or selectionist theory to arrive at more general explanations.
Comment and Critique

My concerns regarding ceramic style analysis fall into two areas: inappropriate comparisons and analogies, and replaying old methodological debates in new guises. First, I am disturbed by what seems to be an incautious and uncritic a l - a n d unvoiced--assumption that "style is style" in all times and places. True, we have discussion ad n a u s e u m on what style "means," if anything. But archaeologists have a propensity to generalize from the findings, meanings, and methods of one study to their own datasets without carefully evaluating the appropriateness of their analogies. For example, archaeologists have, on the one hand, eagerly claimed to recognize major contrasts in gendered roles of men and women within given contexts, limited by time and place and language. But while profess-

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ing sensitivity to the ways in which such specific causes of variability have guided our interpretations, we are at the same time leaping headlong across entire continents and millennia, and skipping cavalierly through varying levels of societal complexity and subsistence technologies, different expressive media, and hosts of functional contexts in interpreting styles. Can analyses of styles of twentieth-century gourds in Africa really tell us something about prehistoric potters in the midwestern United States? I worry that in much of the continuing debate about styles--what they are and what they mean-we are talking past each other as a consequence of inappropriate comparisons and analogies. This is unnecessarily cluttering up the concept of style and confusing our interpretations of it. Like many others, I think we should be more judicious in interpreting "stylistic" analyses of artifacts recovered from prehistoric contexts (analyses carried out for purposes of describing formal variability) in terms of the findings of ethnographic or ethnoarchaeological studies, which try to read in encoded "meanings" and content (e.g., messages about group identity). To date, the principal outcome of most of these efforts has been a series of cautionary tales. Another of my concerns centers on the roles of consumers and functions of the styled objects: Can interpretive parallels be drawn for stylistic behavior appearing on objects produced for household use, for local markets, for community domestic/ritual use, or for "foreigners" (i.e., modern tourist art)? Can interpretations of the meaning of styles confidently be intercompared between (for example) projectile points or headbands of the Kalahari San, a hunter-forager group in Africa, and styles of pottery in the ancient civilization of Teotihuacan (for example) or household potters among Kalinga horticulturalists in the Philippines? In order to have greater confidence in statements about what styles are and what they do, it might be helpful if we began by limiting initial fields of comparison to like times, places, media, contexts, and/or functions. One way in which this might be implemented is that we should first try to achieve a greater understanding of styles among hunter-collectors and styles among horticulturalists, styles among potters in this culture area and potters in that one, styles in lithics here and in lithics there, and so forth. Although this position necessitates an unpleasant degree of reductionism and "pigeon-holing" of cultural variability, it might help us fmd a way out of the murk. After these components are better comprehended, then we can try to move more assuredly toward some higher level of synthesis. An encouraging note of support for this direction has been voiced by Carr and Neitzel (1995b, p. 9), who observe that styles in complex societies differ from those at band and tribal levels, the differences reflecting internal patterns of "vertical and horizontal role segregation" and "forms of communication, interaction, and/or social strategies among various social segments."

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Related to this, archaeologists are increasingly espousing the position that styles are "about" (among other things) ideology, relations of power, social production, and resistance. (This currently popular rephrasing is, of course, the latest in the series of interpretive bandwagons that have eclipsed first ceramic sociology and then Wobstian information exchange.) All these relational domains can be expected to be very differentmand have different kinds and degrees of expression--within societies at different levels of socio-econo-political complexity, and particularly among societies having experienced different degrees of "destructuration" since European contact. One example comes from the Kono of West Africa, where the "associations" or "idioms" (i.e., "meanings") of pottery have changed in the twentieth century because of the introduction of metal wares. Hardin (1993, p. 250) notes "a trend toward new distinctions between secular and ritual domains, which results directly from the introduction of a market economy and a newly emerging emphasis on capitalism and goods." Similarly, extended reflections on post-colonial transformations in styles of modern Mexican cooking pottery can be found in Kaplan (1994). In this context DeBoer's (1991) longitudinal analysis of stylistic change in Andean South America is intriguing. DeBoer (1991, p. 147) identifies two kinds of what he calls "decorative organizations" (rather than styles), pervasive and partitive. Among the Shipibo in the Peruvian Amazon, decoration pervades the "total artifactual environment," while among the Chachi of coastal Ecuador decoration is "partitioned according to medium" (p. 151). Each pattern exhibits very different potentials for change, as the Chachi have experienced both more European contact and more decorative change in comparison to the Shipibo. According to DeBoer (1991, p. 157), "Because Chachi decorative brganization displays weak linkages across various artifactual media, any one medium is freer to change without threatening massive, across-the-board readjustments." Shipibo pervasive decoration, on the other hand, displays an extraordinary hypocoherence, and as such may "be subject to catastrophic genesis or demise ... [or] tenacious resistance to change." This kind of a long-term appraisal of the behavior of "styles of styles" is more likely to bring valuable insights for archaeologists into the role(s) of ceramic style than is a narrow, static focusing on decorative style elements or symmetry patterns. In addition to inappropriate analogies, a second critique of ceramic style analysis concerns the recycling of old debates. There is something surreal about reading the current generation of articles on ceramic style analysis, and recent summaries of approaches to archaeological style in general. The arguments, with all their dithering about active versus passive styles, and different kinds of styles, and meanings of styles, etc., hit me with "'deja vu all over again:" I've read this stuff before! It was in a different guise

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then, however, and that guise was ceramic classification. The contentious discussions about ceramic style analysis are in some senses simply a rehash of debates carried out nearly half a century ago concerning ceramic types, their creation, and their meaning: Are types "artificial," i.e., created by the analyst, or are they "real," i.e., inherent in the collection? When I read the current articles on ceramic styles, if I simply substitute the word "style" for "type," I am dragged back into the declamatory literature on classification that I read long ago as a graduate student. I hope we are not doomed to replay all our old method and theory debates every 50 years. Back in those early days archaeologists soon had their fill of the arguments about classification, realizing--in part via a strong mercy dose of positivism--that types are merely analytical tools in service to a research question. Although today the field is suffering some lingering aches and pains from its bout with postprocessualism, it can only be hoped that maybe someday approaches to (or definitions of) styles will also be seen similarly, i.e., as heuristic devices. We need to move on. Hegmon (1992, p. 531) was optimistic: "Fortunately o.. researchers are increasingly replacing debates about which theory of style or kind of analysis is correct with the conclusion that many perspectives may be applicable, depending on the problem at hand." A similar view is enunciated by Plog (1995, p. 374): "We ... need to measure more aspects of stylistic variation, not fewer." Still, for me all of this resonates in the older classification literature where, paraphrasing J.O. Brew (1946, p. 65), we might read: "We need more rather than fewer [stylistic analyses], different [stylistic analyses], always new [stylistic analyses] to meet our needs. We must not be satisfied with a single [stylistic analysis] of a group of artifacts or of a cultural development, for that way lies dogma and defeat."

POTTERY ORIGINS Archaeologists interested in pottery have generally devoted greatest attention to the "high end" of the production continuum, that of specialized, high-volume production in complex societies. The opposite end, both temporally and in terms of complexity, incorporates the earliest stages of the ceramic craft, but the origins of pottery making--a fascinating question from the point of view of the history of technology--has been "widely regarded as a problem not worth pursuing" (Brown, 1989, p. 203). Until recently. Several investigations are beginning to call into question the time-honored association of pottery with Neolithic sedentarization and food production, taking a fresh look at the when, where, and why of earliest pottery manufacture (see papers in Barnett and Hoopes, 1995; also

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Hoopes, 1994). Although it has long been realized that manufacture and use of pottery was not limited to sedentary peoples in prehistory, there seems to be increasing interest in the clay artifacts found among mobile, hunter-gatherer-forager groups, past and present. Examples include stylistic analysis of Bushman pottery [Bollong, 1994; Ridings and Sampson, 1990; Sampson, 1988 (also Conkey's 1989 review)], along with Reid's (1989) discussion of the pottery of northern North America from a materials science perspective and Sassaman's (1993) study of the earliest pottery in the southeastern United States. Brown (1989) stimulated renewed interest in early pottery by proposhag an economic (supply and demand) model of why pottery began to be used among non-pottery-using peoples. Although his focus was on the adoption, rather than the initial invention, of pottery containers, he argued against prevailing "adaptationist" models that emphasize their potential advantages. Most work directed toward questions about early pottery has been less theoretical and more empirical and technological. One example is the analysis of 26,000-year old "Venus" figurines at Dolni Vestoniqe, Czechoslovakia (Vandiver et aL, 1989, 1990). In this investigation, radiography, microscopy, differential thermal analysis, and other methods were employed to examine the raw materials and techniques of manufacture of these obj e c t s - t h e origins of ceramic technology, in other words. The startling conclusion is that they may have been intentionally produced to explode during firing. Several researchers looking at early (Archaic period) pottery in the United States [and elsewhere, e.g.,-the Near East (Vandiver, 1987)] have called attention to the fact that much of this material was organic-tempered and low-fired, the "quintessential crudware" (Schiffer and Skibo, 1987, p. 602). As a consequence of these temper and firing choices the pottery was porous and susceptible to breakage by freeze-thaw cycling, making it difficult to recover in the archaeological record (Reid, 1984; Skibo et al., 1989; cf. Goodyear, 1988). The manufacture and use of this early fiber-tempered pottery--which took nearly two millennia to be widely adopted throughout the southeastern United States--have been discussed in terms of comparisons to existing cooking technology [soapstone vessels (Sassaman, 1993)] as well as with reference to the performance characteristics implicated in the succeeding technological transition from fiber to mineral (sand) temper [for differing methodological approaches to the same transition, compare Schiffer and Skibo (1987) and Vandiver (1987)]. Inevitably, perhaps, interest in the origins of pottery, as well as in technological innovations such as the potter's wheel, has been contextualized within the perspectives of gender (e.g., Rice, 1991; Wright, 1991). These

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studies have underscored cultural biases in traditional models of production organization and scale, in which women's participation in these activities is commonly overlooked and/or underreported. A gendered perspective forces consideration of the possibility that concepts such as "craft specialization" not only are ethnocentric, but also, because of their emphasis on intensification through technological investment, may tend to orient archaeologists' questions about production in such a way that only male pottery making activities can provide answers (Rice, 1991, p. 440). [For another view, see Byrne's (1994) cross-cultural study relating men's pottery making activity to limited access to arable land.] Although none of these studies satisfactorily explains the events and processes that first prompted people--whether women or men--to begin to make containers out of clay, it can only be hoped that an increased interest in early pottery worldwide will prompt renewed attention to this question.

SOME CLOSING OBSERVATIONS This review has presented a survey of recent research in three areas of ceramic analysis, functional analysis, stylistic studies, and pottery origins, with an effort to emphasize those contributions that are fairly widely accessible and that are likely to have some utility to a broad set of (primarily Americanist) researchers. Obviously if this review were authored by a Europeanist, or if it were focused on ceramic research in a particular geographical or culture area--the Mediterranean, Mesoamerica, Southeast Asia, etc.--the content and tenor would have been very different. There are several perspectives from which recent ceramic research can be viewed. One perspective comes by way of comparison with an earlier article (Rice, 1984), in which I sketched my reflections on future directions in ceramic studies. I have found it interesting to compare those ideas-which were more desiderata than predictions--with my current assessment of the state of the field. In the earlier paper I had outlined four areas of concern: (a) disjunction between goals and practice of ceramic analysis, with a wish for reconsidering ceramic classification units; (b) the interface between ceramic variables and anthropological concepts of context (space--time relations; ethnicity) and concepts of process; (c) processes of change in ceramics and their relationship to general cultural change; and (d) methods--devoting similar scrutiny to ceramic variables as is devoted to analytical techniques. Of these four general topics, it is only the latter (and perhaps the second as well) that seem to have actually preoccupied archaeologists interested in ceramics over the last decade. Classification of

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pottery has been largely disregarded in the recent literature [but see Read (1989) for more general discussion of current thinking on classification in archaeology]. Likewise, ceramic change has merited little attention (but cf. Stark, 1991). Instead, it is the analysis and interpretation of a whole complex suite of ceramic variables, particularly those relating to function and use, to which ceramic archaeologists and ethnoarchaeologists have directed major recent efforts. In the realm of stylistic analysis, it is heartening to note that anthropologists and archaeologists are giving increasing attention to development of "middle range theory" (see papers in Carr and Neitzel, 1995a). This, in turn, ties in to more encompassing questions of theory and their relevance for broader realms of material culture. These and other topics of recent interest in ceramic research are addressed in the forthcoming Part 2 of this review.

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Braun, D. P. (1995). Style, selection, and historicity. In Carl C., and Neitzel, J. E. (eds.), Style, Society, and Person. Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 123-141. Brew, J.O. (1946). The uses and abuses of taxonomy. In Archaeology of Alkali Ridge, Southeastern Utah, Papers of the Peabody Museum, Vol. 21, Peabody Museum, Cambridge, pp. 44--66. Bronitsky, G. (1986). The use of materials-science techniques in the study of pottery construction and use. In Schiffer, M. B. (ed.), Advances in Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 9, Academic Press, Orlando, FL, pp. 209-276. Bronitsky, G. (ed.) (1989). Pottery Technology, Ideas and Approaches, Westview Press, Boulder, CO. Bronitsky, G., and Hamer, R. (1986). Experiments in ceramic technology: The effects of various tempering materials on impact and thermal-shock resistance. American Antiquity 51(1): 89-101. Brown, J. A. (1989). The beginnings of pottery as an economic process. In van der Leeuw, S. E., and Torrence, R. (eds.), What's New? A Closer Look at the Process of Innovation, Unwin Hyman, London, pp. 203-224. Byrne, B. (1994). Access to subsistence resources and the sexual division of labor among potters. Cross-Cultural Research 28(3): 225-250. Canouts, V. (1991). A formal approach to design: Symmetry and beyond. In Bishop, R. L., and Lange, F. W. (eds.), The Ceramic Legacy of Anna O. Shepard, University Press of Colorado, Niwot, pp. 280-320. Carr, C., and Neitzel, J. E. (eds.) (1995a). Style, Society, and Person. Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives, Plenum Press, New York. Carr, C., and Neitzel, J. E. (1995b). Integrating approaches to material style in theory and philosophy. In Carr, C., and Neitzel, J.E. (eds.), Style Society, and Person. Archaeological and Ethnological Perspectives, Plenum Press, New York, pp. 3-20. Charters, S., Evershed, R. P., Goad, L. J., Leyden, A., Btinkhorn, P. W., and Denham, V. (1993). Quantification and distribution of lipid in archaeological ceramics: Implications for sampling potsherds for organic residue analysis and the classification of vessel use. Archaeometry 35(2): 211-223. Conkey, M. W. (1989). Ceramics and territory. Science 244: 1500. Conkey, M. W., and Hastorf, C. (eds.) (1990). The Uses of Style in Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge. David, N., Sterner, J., and Gavua, K. (1988). Why pots are decorated. Current Anthropology 39(3): 365-389. Deal, M. (1990). Exploratory analyses of food residues from prehistoric pottery and other artifacts from Eastern Canada. Society for Archaeological Sciences Bulletin 13(1): 6-12. Deal, M., with Silk, P. (1988). Absorption residues and vessel function: A case study from the Maine-Maritimes region. In Kolb, C. C., and Lackey, L. (eds.), A PotforAll Reasons: Ceramic Ecology Revisited, Temple University, Laboratory of Anthropology (special publication of Cerclmica de Cultura Maya), Philadelphia, pp. 105-125. Deal, M., Morton, J., and Foulkes, E. (1991). The role of ceramics among the prehistoric hunter-gatherers of the Main-Maritimes region: A view from the New Brunswick interior. In Deal, M. (ed.), Archaeology of the Maritime Provinces: Past and Present Research, Council of Maritime Premiers, Fredericton, NB, pp. 8-40. DeBoer, W. R. (1990). Interaction, imitation, and communication as expressed in style: The Ucayali experience. In Conkey, M. W., and Hastorf, C. (eds.), The Uses of Style in Archaeology, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, pp. 82-104. DeBoer, W. R. (1991). The decorative burden: Design, medium, and change. In Longacre, W. A. (ed.), Ceramic Ethnoarchaeology, University of Arizona Press, Tucson, pp. 144-161. Dunnelt, R. C., and Hunt, T. L. (1990). Elemental composition and inference of ceramic vessel function. Current Anthropology 31(3): 330--336. Fankhauser, B. (1994). Protein and lipid analysis of food residues. In Hather, J. G. (ed.), Tropical Archaeobotany, Applications and New Developments, Routledge, London, pp. 227-250.

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