The Emergence of Pottery: Technology and Innovation in Ancient Societies. William K. Barnett and John W. Hoopes (Editors), 1995, Smithsonian Institution Press, xviii Ο© 285 pp., $55. 00 (hardbound), $29.95 (softbound).
This unique volume consists of a core of 18 regionally focused papers sandwiched between an editors' introduction and three summary, topical/theoretical chapters, all of which are revised versions of papers delivered at two symposia held at Society for American Archaeology annual meetings in 1990 and 1993. Essentially, the core chapters consist of a series of case studies that ask a common question: How and why did the manufacture of ceramic containers first appear in various regions around the world? In addressing this question most authors have adopted a ''postprocessual'' stance that eschews environmental or economic causality, tending instead to emphasize internal societal factors that encouraged or facilitated the adoption of the new technology. It is in this regard that the volume stands out. It has a distinctly '90's flavor quite unlike any of the '60's/'70's/early-'80's literature, which was imbued with the perspective and rhetoric of the then-fashionable ''processual'' archaeology that emphasized adaptation, ecology, and neoevolutionism.
The regions for which the archaeological evidence is reviewed for the first appearance of ceramic containers include the following: Japan (C. M. Aikens); the southern Sahara (A. E. Close); the Near East (A. M. T. Moore); Europe (five chapters by K. D. Vitelli, J. L. Manson, W. K. Barnett, P. Bogucki, and A. B. Gebauer plus a sixth, one of the concluding chapters by I. Armit and B. Finlayson that is devoted mainly to Scotland); South America (four chapters by A. C. Roosevelt, A. Oyuela-Caycedo, C. Rodriguez, and J. E. Damp and L. P. Vargas S.); Central America (three chapters by R. Cooke, J. W. Hoopes, and B. Arroyo); Mesoamerica (J. E. Clark and D. Gosser); the American Southeast (K. E. Sassaman); and the American Southwest (P. L. Crown and W. H. Wills). Since the scope of the book is seemingly global, it is noteworthy that some important regions-for example, all of mainland East and South Asia, Oceania, and the Northeastern, Midwest, and Great Plains portions of North America-are not represented.
Pitting independent invention against diffusion, a theme so commonly invoked in much of the archaeological literature to account for technological innovations plays little role in the articles in this volume. Indeed, so little explicit consideration is given to diffusion (i.e., the acquisition of technologies through cultural interaction) that the impression one might get from this volume is that pottery containers were independently invented again and again de novo in each of the regions discussed.