Lab News

Fall Lab 2006: Pottery, Pots, and Participants

by Jonathan Till, Lab Analysis Manager
October 31, 2006

This year’s fall lab programs focused on the artifact class perhaps most important to archaeologists studying ancestral Pueblo sites: pottery. Over a two-week period, 14 fall lab participants helped Crow Canyon’s laboratory staff wash and catalog artifacts from our current excavation site, Goodman Point Pueblo. Participants and staff then analyzed pottery from this thirteenth-century site and, in the process, gained an appreciation for the sophisticated art and technology that lay behind the pottery traditions of the Mesa Verde region. We also examined more than 450 sherds from Albert Porter Pueblo as part of a special analysis of rim sherds from white ware bowls. This analysis is designed to help us refine pottery chronology.

Fall lab participants help reconstruct a cooking jar.

Both fall lab sessions were capped by a pottery-vessel-refitting project. The lab staff recently learned through an examination of field records that a number of vessels from structure floors at Sand Canyon Pueblo (more than 50 clusters of sherds) may not have been recognized during that project’s initial laboratory analysis, which occurred well over 10 years ago. We requested the pottery from these clusters from the Anasazi Heritage Center, where all the materials from Sand Canyon Pueblo are curated. With the assistance of fall lab participants, we evaluated the potential of each sherd cluster to be refit into a vessel. For a sherd cluster to be designated a “vessel,” enough sherds have to fit together to permit an estimation of vessel volume.

Participants in the first fall lab session examined 24 clusters of corrugated gray jar sherds. Corrugated gray jars were used for cooking and therefore were essential to the workaday activities of the Pueblo people, yet they are relatively understudied and perhaps underrepresented in most analyses of artifact assemblages. Therefore, it was critical for us to identify—and reconstruct—these vessels in the Sand Canyon Pueblo assemblage. Of the 24 clusters examined, three could be refit into vessels that provided volumetric data. One is complete enough to warrant its permanent refitting, perhaps for display at the Anasazi Heritage Center.

Participants in the second session worked on clusters of white ware sherds. They evaluated nearly 30 of these clusters, which included broken bowls, jars, ladles, and mugs. Six vessels—five bowls and one ladle—were complete enough to allow estimates of volume. The evaluation of these vessels, as well as of the corrugated jars, will help us better understand household artifact assemblages at Sand Canyon Pueblo, which in turn will contribute to our knowledge of Pueblo population and social organization during the waning years of the thirteenth century.

Click on each image below to see a larger image.
Reconstructed Mesa Verde Corrugated Gray jar.	Reconstructed Mesa Verde Black-on-white bowl.	Helping hands.
Read more about Crow Canyon’s excavation and lab programs.