Fingerprints may indicate who made Ancestral Puebloan pottery

June 10, 2019 8:54 PM

"For centuries, pottery has been produced by women in the pueblos of the Southwest." That long-held belief, as stated in a write-up of modern artists featured in Feminism in Clay: Ceramic Art by Native American Women, is being challenged, based on a study of fingerprints found on nearly a thousand shards of corrugated pottery from a site in Chaco Canyon, which suggests that when demand for pottery got especially high, Ancestral Puebloan men got in on the act as well (Atlas Obscura). Reconstructing sexual divisions of labor from fingerprints on Ancestral Puebloan pottery (PNAS, abstract only).
posted by filthy light thief (1 comment total)

The Atlas Obscura pullquote is a bit cheeky. Here's more detail from the PNAS article:

The evolution of the sexual division of labor within human societies is difficult to reconstruct because of the scarcity of direct evidence recovered from archaeological contexts, and yet many disciplines make assumptions regarding how labor first became specialized in our species. We propose an innovative method for identifying the sex of potters through the analysis of fingerprint impressions recovered from material culture. An application of the method to ancient pottery demonstrates that males and females were both significantly involved in producing vessels. The study further suggests that the exact proportion of each sex involved in pottery making was quite fluid, and may have varied among different groups in the same community, as well as changed from generation to generation.

posted by filthy light thief at 8:59 PM on June 10, 2019 [3 favorites]