Viewing ceramic and technological change through sub-traditions in the Western Maya Lowlands

Traditions are generally used to describe the recurring presence of some grouping of attributes shared by spatially contiguous social groups over relatively long periods of time general patterns of which are applicable to material remains Western Maya Lowlands.  These are large scale, nomothetic entities that can serve to emphasize comparability among certain classes of pottery.  Sub-traditions, based on detailed analysis of formal variation and paste composition, although another nomothetic heuristic, can be seen to reflect the specifics of local histories that situate ceramic products within a variably long context of social group interaction.  These sub-traditions must be gleaned from ceramic data that goes well beyond general notions of ceramic form or surface finish, as used in Type-variety, requiring the increased resolving power of instrumental analytical techniques and appropriate numerical approaches to extract information from assembled multistate data sets.  I illustrate the role of sub-traditions to monitor shifting expressions of ceramic manufacture at the Western Maya Lowland site of Palenque, Chiapas, that lean themselves to the creation of more robust narratives concerning social, political and economic changes at this important Classic site and in its immediate sustaining area.

Ronald L. Bishop received his doctorate in Anthropology in 1975 from southern Illinois University and is presently the Curator for Mexican and Central American Archaeology in the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of Natural History.  In 1973 he began the first of what would be several years in the Department of Chemistry at Brookhaven National Laboratory, carrying out research with Edward V. Sayre and Garman Harbottle, applying neutron activation analysis to archaeological problems.  He has spent 40 years analyzing ceramics and jade from Mesoamerica (especially Maya), Lower Central America, the greater U.S. Southwest, and more recently, Hispanic and Mexican Colonial pottery in California, Texas and Mexico.  He has written extensively on the compositional analysis of cultural materials, integrating the analytical data obtained from the study of museum objects with analyses of artifacts from recent excavation and surveys.  He has published extensively on subjects of ceramic manufacture and distribution, especially as these are aided through the use of chemical and petrographic analyses of pottery.  His mathematical modeling of compositional data incorporates both geological and social aspects of material production, use and exchange.