The Development of Southeastern Archaeology

2. Ceramics

CHAPTER 2 Ceramics JON L. GIBSON CERAMIC ANALYSIS is a southern tradition, like sippin' juleps on the veranda and laissez les boilS temps rouler dans Ie bayou. Since the beginning of the modern archaeological era over fifty years ago, pottery has been the most important resource in the South. Its long and faithful service prompted Haag (1961:18) to liken pottery to Greek handmaidens. Nevertheless, no longer can it be said that southern archaeology is pottery or it is nothing. Recent years have seen the near-religious devotion to ceramics lessen as other materials, such as lithics and biological remains , have gained analytical importance and as understanding of the formation of the archaeological record has become more sophisticated. Ceramics have even come to be viewed, in some quarters, as broken dishes, the physical metaphors of past behavioral conditions. Still, whether regarded as handmaidens or just cracked pots, ceramics continue to be of major interest to southern archaeology. Most of southern prehistory is little more than ceramic history, and that, in turn, has been a result of how ceramics have been conceptualized over the past half century. To really understand southern archaeology requires recognition of these theoretical-analytical frameworks and their roles as shapers of data and sources of research directions and interpretive disagreements. Here I examine the major frameworks that have guided southern ceramic studies and molded southern archaeology. This examination reveals that the South has been both a part of and apart from mainstream American archaeology, and the emphasis on ceramics, particularly the culture historical dimension of ceramics, has in large measure determined this relationship. Ceramics 19 Geographically, the South, or the Southeast if one prefers, consists of those contiguous states lying southeast of the Mississippi and Tennessee river valleys. This is the Old South, the land of cotton and Br'er Rabbit . This is the Confederacy, the home of General Lee and Miss Scarlet. This is Dixie, where 01' times are not forgotten and everybody still says "ma'am." This is the South in all its stereotyped glory, and these images and the ideas and attitudes they evoke are, I suspect, as much to blame for the South's contemporary status as a culture area as is any objective measure of prehistoric cultural uniformity. The modem social and political fences erected around the South have been rather penneable at times and in places but have still managed to enclose a sectionalism stronger than most other parts of the United States. As this examination discloses, southern archaeology has always been slightly out of kilter with American archaeological development in general . a relationship aptly summed up by one rock musician's comment, "The South is the only place we play where everybody can clap to the off-beat" (Marcus 1975:149). This review is an effort to expose the tenets of southern ceramic studies in the context of southern archaeology in particular and American archaeology in general; it is one person's attempt to identify the beat to which southern archaeology has been clapping . The Social Status of Southern Archaeology Junior Samples often said, "I don't know nuthin', but I suspect a lot of things" (quoted in Reed 1986:68). This admission is certainly epistemologically appropriate to southern archaeology. How southern archaeology has come to suspect what it does has been a consequence of its method, theory, and epistemology, and most of that conceptualizing has been about ceramics. Talking about method and theory in southern archaeology may seem like a contradiction in terms, for if there is one thing that characterizes southern archaeology, it has been its disdain for theoretical discourse in general and its virtual nonparticipation in the polemics that have raged over method and theory during the past 30 years (Dunne111990). This nonpartidpation should not be regarded as a case of being uninformed, because archaeologists domiciled in the southeastern states have always made up one of the largest regional contingents of the Society for American Archaeology, whose journal, American Antiquity, has featured this paradigm-crisis literature. On the contrary, the South seems not to have been caught up in this rhetorical maelstrom, probably because it main- 20 Ion L. Gibson tained a strong commitment to culture history, which was the major source of dissatisfaction to the new archaeology. Why this has been so is hard to say: perhaps because there really is an essential time-defying conservatism in the South; perhaps because the South continues...