The White Ware Pottery from Tijeras Pueblo (LA 581): Learning Frameworks and Communities of Practice and Identity

Abstract

The Tijeras Pueblo Ceramics Project was designed to explore how the origin and spread of glaze-painted pottery and technology among the Ancestral Eastern Pueblos of the middle Rio Grande was associated with inter-regional macro-scale social processes, such as immigration, population aggregation, and coalescent community formation during the Pueblo IV period in the American Southwest (AD 1275-1425). However, carbon-painted black-on-white ceramics make up over half of the decorated pottery from Tijeras Pueblo and these white wares have their own unique story to tell. In particular, this article argues that the diversity of traits that characterize local carbon-painted black-on-white pottery was directly associated with the context in which novice potters learned to make pots, how technological practices were transmitted and regulated within these communities of practice, and how such practices were related to strategies of coalescence and identity formation around the turn of the fourteenth century.