Beloved Things: Interpreting Curated Pottery in Diasporic Contexts
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Beloved Things: Interpreting Curated Pottery in Diasporic Contexts Shannon Cowell 1
& Kelly
Jenks 2
Accepted: 16 September 2020/ # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract Historical archaeologists often view curated or heirloom pottery as a frustrating anomaly in the dating of historical-period sites or contexts. Fewer pause to consider why the artifacts were curated in the first place, or what their presence reveals about the people who maintained them. Drawing on a case study of curated micaceous pottery at a Hispanic diaspora site in east-central New Mexico, this article argues that investigation of heirloom pottery can offer insights into the functional, familial, and cultural significance of these beloved things. Keywords Curation . Diaspora . Identity . Ceramics . New Mexico
“Her work was constant—preparing meals, always piles of tortillas on the table, a pot of beans bubbling on the stove, the aroma of home….” Rudolfo Anaya (2020:xiv)
Introduction Historical archaeologists often view curated or heirloom ceramics with irritation rather than interest because of the way they complicate the relative dating of historical-period sites. Stanley South (1977:207) acknowledged the likelihood of recovering “a few heirloom pieces” of pottery in collections from sites and sought to account for them
* Shannon Cowell [email protected] Kelly Jenks [email protected]
1
Archaeology Southwest, 300 North Ash Alley, Tucson, AZ 85701, USA
2
New Mexico State University, P.O. Box 30001, MSC 3BV, Las Cruces, NM 88003, USA
International Journal of Historical Archaeology
through the development of his mean ceramic dating formula. Subsequent generations of archaeologists have argued over whether ceramics are even useful for dating sites, in part because of their relatively long use-lives and the greater likelihood of recovering heirloom or hand-me-down items (e.g., Adams 2003; Williamson 2006). Yet, while historical archaeologists often mention heirloom ceramics in the context of archaeological dating, few pause to ask why these artifacts were curated or what their presence reveals about the people who maintained them. In this article, we consider these questions in our analysis of curated micaceous cookpot fragments recovered from a late nineteenth/early twentieth-century Hispanic diaspora community in east-central New Mexico. Through this analysis, we argue that the investigation of heirloom pottery can offer new insights into the functional, familial, and cultural significance of these beloved things.
Materiality, Migration, and Inherited Objects Anthropologists have long been interested in what things reveal about the people who make, exchange, use, and discard them. Marcel Mauss (1954) considered how reciprocal gift exchanges function to create and maintain social relationships in so-called traditional societies. A generation of anthropologists inspired by Karl Marx focused on the commodification of things within capitalist societies, considering its many social and p
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