Crafting an Urban Society: A Study of Raw Material Procurement for Pottery Production at Yucuita and Etlatongo in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico
Open Access DepositedThis dissertation is a study of raw material procurement for pottery production during the development of early urban societies in ancient Mesoamerica during the Middle to Terminal Formative periods (700 BCE – 200 CE). I approach this subject from a relational perspective to understand how potters engaged with the natural environment and made use of its raw materials during periods of significant sociopolitical transformations in prehistory. This perspective is shaped by two archaeological approaches in the study of pottery production – the communities of practice approach and the ceramic taskscape concept – to provide insight into potters' social relationships and spatial practices associated with pottery production in the context of early urbanization. This multifaceted approach encourages archaeologists to consider how potters, quite literally, contributed to crafting an urban society as they responded to the broader social, political, and economic changes of the time. In this dissertation, I focus on how potters’ procurement practices played out across the natural and cultural landscape of early urban centers in the Mixteca Alta of Oaxaca, Mexico. During the Yucuita and Early Ramos phases (500-100 BCE) – a 400-year period of early urbanization in the Mixteca Alta – potters at two independent urban centers, Yucuita and Etlatongo, shared local technological traditions reflected in the variety of paste recipes displayed by pottery assemblages excavated from both sites. The composition of these paste recipes indicates that potters procured clays and sediments derived from a diverse range of geological parent materials, suggesting that the ceramic taskscapes associated with procuring these clays were situated throughout different parts of the natural landscape in the Mixteca Alta. This dissertation presents compositional data generated from neutron activation analysis (NAA) and petrographic thin-section analysis conducted on 200 samples of Yucuita and Early Ramos phase pottery from both sites and 48 raw clay samples collected during the 2020 field season of the Mixteca Alta Clay Survey (MACS). The compositional data suggest that potters in a multigenerational community of practice used one main paste recipe over the 400-year period of urbanization, while other smaller-scale communities of practice also endured the larger sociopolitical changes of the time. Based on these data and observations, I argue that potters in communities of practice contributed to urbanization in the region by adjusting their procurement practices in the ceramic taskscapes formed across the new sociopolitical landscape of early urbanism in the Mixteca Alta.
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