Revisiting Aguabuena Pottery-making Through Discontinuity

Abstract

Discontinuity plays an important role in the social and material world of Aguabuena potters, a small rural community in the Colombian Andes. Drawing on long-term ethnographic fieldwork, I explore the changes in modes of production and gender division of work during the last decades of the twentieth century and the fractures in space, memory, and materiality to address discontinuities in ceramic production. The wheel and its transformations are taken as an important factor of these processes. Against the common trend in the archaeology of Colombia to see pottery-making as a static craft, rooted in an indigenous past, this article aims to revisit ethnoarchaeological and ethnographic data to argue how cracks and gaps, besides empirical facts, can be seen as complex analytical lenses through which to embrace ruptures and less linear narratives.