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9. Petrographic Thin-Section Analysis of Poverty Point Pottery
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ter dippers and serving dishes than cooking pots. Obviously, liquid- and food-holding vessels need to be free-standing or propped up somehow. Size and shape details are a good source of information and ideas. Unfortunately , they are not as helpful as they could be, because they are inconsistently reported and, even when reported, usually are given as averages rather than as discrete measurements and attributes. POTTERY’S PLACE IN THE SUN What is the point of all this talk about ¤rst pottery’s correlation with mound components and link to mounds? What is wrong with pottery being used for everyday cooking? Absolutely nothing from a physical viewpoint; absolutely everything judging by its scarcity. If pottery is daily cookware, it ought to be one of the most abundant materials remaining at residences. It is not. So, we are left grasping at functional will-o’-the-wisps that can make sense of its rarity and its association with mounds and mound sites. We are searching for ¤rst pottery’s place in the sun. Discovering how ¤rst pottery is used is not the Holy Grail. Yet, how it functions and the contexts in which it functions lie close to the heart of the matter—why pottery is adopted in the ¤rst place. Poverty Point and the Lower Mississippi Valley are not cradles of the “container revolution”(Smith 1986). First potteries “came into” the Lower Mississippi Valley via stimulus diffusion from the eastern Gulf area, where they date as much as a thousand years earlier (Walthall and Jenkins 1976). Even homegrown clay-grittempered pottery (Tchefuncte) derives artistically, though not technologically , from eastern Gulf prototypes (Ned Jenkins, personal communication, 2003; cf. Hays and Weinstein, this volume). Are you proud of us yet, Ned Jenkins? The sort of stimulus diffusion we think responsible has been described as dependent invention—a case of one group assimilating ideas and technical know-how from another while adapting the technology to suit its own ends, often in ways that differ from how the technology was used in the donor group (Clark and Gosser 1995:209–210). It reminds us of the eighteenth-century Tunica-Biloxi group living on the Red River who acquired Spanish and French silver coins, not to spend, but to convert into ornaments (Gregory and Webb 1971) or the eighteenth-century Attakapa of upper Bayou Teche who chipped scrapers from French wine bottles (although we’re con¤dent the Attakapa and the French Acadians used the contents the same way). Pottery may have been practical cookware in the eastern Gulf area, but it doesn’t seem to have caught on that way in the Lower Mississippi Valley, at least at ¤rst. 188 / Gibson and Melancon Too rare to be used for daily cooking, pottery, we contend, served ritual and/or labor-management purposes—specialized contexts that mark pottery ’s place in the sun. From coastal Panama to coastal Georgia, ¤rst pottery is envisioned as ritual drink- and food-serving containers (Clark and Blake 1994; Clark and Gosser 1995; Hoopes 1995; Russo 2004; Russo and Heide, this volume;Saunders,this volume).Employed thus,pottery becomes a prestige technology for individuals and families striving to gain esteem and in®uence via competitive or reciprocal feasting (Hayden 1995a,1995b,2001). Yet, there is nothing inherently contradictory about a prestige technology having a practical side too, such as turning out labor-saving, expedient cookware for use during peak construction periods. Public-event and construction service may explain why Poverty Point pottery is linked with earthworks and earthwork-bearing components. Important mound places play host to important gatherings, and gatherings are celebrated with ceremonies, ball games, and other rituals (Hayden 2001; Swanton 1911, 1931). Almost all gatherings are accompanied by feasts, and feasts require serving containers, hence warranting an easily replaceable service like pottery provides. FIRST POTTERY AN D LOCA L INTER ACTION We don’t have microscopic or material details to share and, lacking them, cannot offer revelations on broad-scale ceramic diffusion or on the web of in-group and between-group social interactions responsible for it. From our armchair, it looks like pottery came into the Lower Mississippi Valley from various places in the Southeast via unfathomed means of historically slow or interrupted information transfer across the pinewood hills, along the Gulf Coast, and straight down the Tennessee-Mississippi river line. Just glancing at the sizeable number of components having ¤ber-tempered ware in Mississippi’s Yazoo Basin compared with the mere handful on the Louisiana side of...