Communities of Practice in the Early Pottery Traditions of the American Southeast

The oldest pottery traditions of the southeastern United States include a series of punctated wares geographically clustered in three locales of the Savannah River region. Although potters in each locale decorated and used pots in virtually identical fashion, they tempered clays and formed vessels in appreciably different ways. Situated learning theory offers a framework for interpreting these divergent trends in early pottery by focusing attention on the multiple communities of practice in which potters participated. Independent data on the handedness of potters supports the inference that techniques for making pottery were transmitted cognately, whereas decorative expression and methods of cooking crosscut residential units as a result of affinal relations. Potential contradictions arising from different types and changing forms of community membership may have contributed to radical changes in pottery technology and decoration after some fifteen generations of relative stability.