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The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community
By Dean E. Arnold University Press of Colorado
Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-60732-314-3
CHAPTER 1
Introduction
Craft Specialization and Social Complexity
During the last few decades, research in ethnoarchaeology has contributed much to the study of craft production and its relationship to the evolution of socioeconomic complexity. One of the gaps in this knowledge, as Miriam Stark argued, is information about the artisans who produce craft products. Although there are exceptions to this generalization, a mass of information exists concerning the ecology, organization, and technical analyses of crafts, but relatively little data exists about the people who make the pots, weave the cloth, or forge the metal.
This work aims to help fill this gap. It examines the history of production units and the changes in their organization in Ticul, Yucatán, over a period of almost forty-four years. Using narratives and images to tell the story of changes in personnel and the use of space, this work goes beyond the quantitative summaries used in my previous work, Social Change and the Evolution of Ceramic Production and Distribution in a Maya Community, to a more holistic understanding of the people who make the pots, where they do it, and changes in production space through time.
The Population of Craftsmen and Archaeology
Knowledge about the population of craftsmen is essential to archaeological interpretation because it lies at the interface between the creation of material objects and the larger social system. It is one of the critical links between the objects archaeologists discover and their interpretations of social organization and social complexity.
Like all craft products, ceramic technology does not just consist of material objects, their constituent raw materials, and the techniques used to make them, but also involves the cognitive knowledge and motor habits necessary to design and produce them. This knowledge and muscle syntax (also called "muscle memory") necessary to fabricate pottery are transmitted from person to person by social processes. These processes link the technology of the craft to the social patterns in the society — not just in relation to the evolution of production but also to its overall organization and its reproduction through time. Similarly, pottery production takes place in a spatial context, and understanding potters' utilization of that space is critical for archaeologists' inferences of the organization of production from excavation data. But what happens to the population of potters and the spatial organization of their craft through time? The answer to this question in the present provides hypotheses for interpreting changing ceramic technology and its production space in the past, and how they reflect the evolution of social complexity.
The Social Organization of Pottery Production
The first major dimension of production organization consists of the organization of the personnel that create the craft product. A quantitative description of this organization was compiled from informal surveys, observations, and notes made during the years from 1965 to 1997, generally described in a previous monograph. That work presented the large-scale patterns of change in potters' social organization, raw material procurement, production technology, demand, and distribution across a period of thirty-two years. These patterns were presented as trend lines, but the data points were limited, and few trend lines showed high correlations with the data. Such patterns, however, did show that most of the potters in the production units were related to the production unit owner.
Another way to describe this change would be to use typologies of production organization developed by Van der Leeuw, Peacock, Brumfiel and Earle, and Costin. Brumfiel and Earle's typology, for example, classified craft specialists as either independent or attached. As applied to pottery, independent specialists produce utilitarian vessels for food preparation, cooking, serving, household ritual, and general household use. Independent potters control their own production and produce pottery that is sold to, bartered, or exchanged with ordinary consumers. Attached specialists, on the other hand, produce vessels for limited demand by a highly restricted clientele, such as elites and the social and political institutions that they control. This type of organization consists of the elite sponsorship of the production process in order to control the distribution and consumption of high-value, high-status goods. Simply stated, the fundamental characteristic of attached specialists consists of the control of production, which has a critical role within the political economy for creating symbols of wealth, power, and status. Consequently, access to ceramic vessels created by attached specialists is restricted to elites who control distribution by regulating production. Elites thus restrict consumption because their sponsorship controls the timing, cost, quality, distribution, and the kind of vessels available.
Unlike the factors that promote attached specialists, Costin argued that different factors underlay the evolution of independent specialists. Sufficient demand must exist to support specialists economically, and it may be a consequence of a large population size and density. Population growth does provide a feedback loop (as deviation-amplifying feedback) for the demand for ceramics and does influence the evolution of specialists, but the relationship is more subtle and nuanced than one might think. Large populations provide a large market for pots, but demand for ritual pottery probably provides the greatest deviation-amplifying effect on production. Further, trade and transportation networks extend the demand for ceramic products, and this extension may result from higher levels of political integration.
Although classification is useful to describe the different kinds of production units among the potters described here and is an important data-reduction technique, it is not a very useful tool in explaining the variability in these units and why and how they change over time. A diachronic ethnography, on the other hand, can be useful to understand how and why ceramic production changes. When applied to production organization in the ethnographic present, it provides explanations of changes in production organization that go beyond saying that "Type A" evolves into "Type B."
Craft Production and Specialization
One of the ways of dealing with the development of social complexity focuses on the characteristics of craft specialization. Costin presented four parameters of specialization, each of which consist of a range of behavior. Her description emphasized degrees of change on a gradual scale rather than just the presence or absence of different features, types, or modes of production. She also proposed eight types using these different parameters, but she also argued that it is more important to describe specialization accurately, how it develops, and how these parameters are expressed differently in varying environmental and cultural conditions.
Each of Costin's parameters was previously described, elaborated, and evaluated in my previous work on Ticul. This work, however, will deal with only two of them that are most relevant to this volume: scale and intensity.
SCALE
Costin's parameter of scale involves two interrelated variables: size of the production unit and the principles of labor recruitment. Size consists of the number of potters per unit, and labor recruitment consists of the composition of the unit and the way in which new production personnel are acquired. At one end of the range are small family-based units in which recruitment is based upon kinship while industrial production lies at the other end of the range, where Costin believes that recruitment is contractual and is based upon skill and availability. Costin proposed that as production units grow, recruitment of close kin gives way to more distant kin, or fictive (or adoptive) kin, and, ultimately, non-related individuals are added to the production unit.
More recently, Costin separates the size of the units from their composition and calls the composition their "constitution." Similarly, Pool and Bey have challenged Costin's conflation of production unit size and labor recruitment into the same variable. They argue that these two components must be separated if one is to understand the degree to which they are related.
As revealed in my previous work and in this work, Costin's scenario does not quite fit the changes in personnel acquisition in Ticul from 1965 to 1997. Household production units may include affinal and collateral kin, which may be a consequence of male inheritance of house lots; these individuals may be critical production personnel quite apart from other factors responsible for the growth of the size of the units.
My research on changes in Ticul pottery production reveals the benefit of uncoupling production unit size and labor recruitment and supports the point made by Costin and Pool and Bey that size and composition in production units should be separate. In Ticul both the principles of recruitment and the resulting composition of the production unit were complex. Although they were somewhat related, the size of the production unit, as measured in the number of potters, was highly variable, and this variability was only partly related to principles of recruitment such as procreation, inheritance of household land, and postnuptial residence behaviors. Rather, selective factors for or against becoming a potter were also responsible for production unit composition.
INTENSITY
Costin's parameter of intensity consists of the amount of time that potters spend on their craft. The lower end of the intensity range consists of part-time specialization whereby craft production supplements subsistence. At the other end of the range is full-time specialization whereby potters exchange their vessels for all required goods and services.
I am often frustrated by detailed discussions of this parameter because they seldom conform to my own observations of real-world ceramic production by preindustrial potters in Mexico, Guatemala, and Peru. Of course, one way to deal with this lack of congruence is simply to argue that the present is different from the past and that studies of craft production in the present do not apply to the past. Obviously, there is truth in this statement, but the models and terminology of craft production come from the present, not from the archaeological data itself. As I have tried to show both in Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process and in my most recent book on Ticul, when one considers the unique structure of clay minerals, the kind of clays and tempers used, and the forming technology, the study of contemporary ceramic production does have great relevance to understanding ancient ceramics as well. The present is all that we have to understand the data from the past.
As I reflect upon my own ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, one of the incongruities with the part-time/full-time specialization dichotomy was trying to understand how my real-life experience with potters is congruent with this distinction in ethnographic situations. It was very difficult to assess empirically the amount of time that potters spend in making pottery and whether it is part-time or full-time production. Of course, it can be redefined by some other measure, such as whether pottery is made for personal use or for exchange, but then why label it in terms of the time spent in production? Identifying it in this way is misleading.
I am not sure that assessing part-time vs. full-time production in the past is really productive or relevant to the world of pottery production. It is, of course, relevant to theories of cultural evolution, but what if the theories are based on erroneous assumptions and not on real-life understanding of how potters behave?
I first faced this problem in trying to deal with part-time/full-time production when I struggled to write about my ethnoarchaeological work in Peru. I noticed that the seasonality of pottery making was based upon the constraining effects of weather and climate on ceramic production as well as upon the scheduling conflict with agricultural responsibilities. I did not notice these constraints previously in Yucatán because inclement weather only hindered pottery production; it did not actually prevent it. Because the rains always came in the afternoons, potters could plan around the predictable time of rainfall and avoid damage to their pots.
During my fieldwork in Yucatán in 1984, however, I found that inclement weather caused considerable interruption at every stage of the behavioral chain of the pottery-making process. Clay mining and delivery were delayed, pottery was not made, and if it was, it could not dry and was easily damaged. Did this interruption mean that production was part-time? If so, was full-time pottery production ever possible in seasonally rainy weather in the past?
During the process of searching for comparative data for Ceramic Theory and Cultural Process, I found that the seasonality of the craft was common around the world and part-time preindustrial pottery production could be predicted by reconstructing the nature of the local climate, because of the agricultural cycle and the environmental constraints on pottery production.
Although I see these challenges to part-time/full-time (i.e., intensity) from the perspective of my own ethnoarchaeological fieldwork, archaeologists are beginning to see them from a different perspective. In the volume edited by Hruby and Flad, some authors argued that archaeologists should get back to basics by understanding the fundamental issues of craft production before tackling notions about what craft specialization actually is. I agree.
In Hirth's volume about craft production in Mesoamerica, the authors challenge the parameter of intensity as part-time/full-time specialization. In the introductory articles in the volume, Hirth invites readers to reevaluate production intensity in ways that render the part-time/full-time distinction irrelevant. Rather than focus on the relative amount of time that an individual puts into craft production, Hirth shifts the focus instead to the household, a theme of the recently published book edited by Conlin and Douglas.
Hirth lays out three alternative concepts to the part-time/full-time distinction that are supported by the remainder of his volume. The first consists of what Hirth calls intermittent crafting, in which craftsmen only practice their trade for a portion of the yearly cycle. The second concept, multi-crafting, involves the practice of several crafts by members of a household, either at the same time or at different times. Hirth's third concept views craft production as a risk-management strategy in which a household diversifies its subsistence tasks, practicing several crafts to insure adequate returns for its sustenance and thus reducing the risks that occur with a single craft.
In this work, readers will see the value of these concepts in the narratives presented here. The data are uneven across the period of this research, but even so, they verify the validity of these concepts in understanding ceramic production, not just in Ticul, but elsewhere as well.
The Context of Production
The subject of this work is the community of potters of Ticul, Yucatán, Mexico, during the last third of the twentieth century and the first eight years of the twenty-first century. Ticul is one of the largest cities in southern Yucatán and is the administrative center of its municipio. Since 1960, it has experienced a great surge in population and has become the most important producer of pottery in Yucatán.
Formerly, the municipio was much larger than it is today, extending south over the hill ridge and including the towns of Santa Elena (formerly called Nohcacab) in Yucatán and Bolonchen in what is now the state of Campeche. According to informants' oral history, these towns were linked to Ticul as locations for their swidden fields and as the source of some migrants that fled political turmoil and became potters.
Ticul's population has roots in the Prehispanic period. Between AD 800 and AD 1000 (the Terminal Classic period), at least some of the population lived in a large settlement just north of the city and in smaller sites nearby. Ticul was also mentioned in the pre-Conquest narrative The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel.
The Units of Production Organization
THE POPULATION OF POTTERS
The largest social and spatial unit of production in Ticul is the community of potters. This unit of scale is a "socially constituted" community, a "local community," and a "community of practice." The notion of a "community of practice" explains, in part, intercommunity variability in ceramic technology and in pottery-making communities in Yucatán and elsewhere. At least in the communities of potters that I have studied in Peru, Guatemala, and Yucatán, pottery production in each community utilizes a unique set of technological and decorative practices that differs in many ways from that of other such communities. Ticul potters have practices, for example, that are unique compared with those in other pottery-making communities in Yucatán. They use different semantic categories of raw materials, prepare their pastes differently, and, until the late 1960s, decorated their pottery in a different way than that made elsewhere in Yucatán. One could call this variability a difference in technological style, but it is more complicated than just "style."
During the last half of the twentieth century, Ticul had the largest population of potters in northern Yucatán (figure 1.1). Based upon my brief surveys of potters in Mama, Akil, and Tepakan in 1967, 1968, and 1994, the numbers of potters in these communities declined and/or became seasonal, whereas the numbers of potters in Ticul increased (figure 1.2).
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Excerpted from The Evolution of Ceramic Production Organization in a Maya Community by Dean E. Arnold. Copyright © 2015 University Press of Colorado. Excerpted by permission of University Press of Colorado.
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