Search

Individuals learning to make pottery must master knowledge of materials and a complex production sequence. Intergenerational transmission of knowledge and diffusion of knowledge are basic processes in all human societies. How individuals learn, what they learn, and from whom they learn become aspects of their identity. Theoretical perspectives on learning and historical documents describing learning provide background for archaeologists interested in how crafts learning occurred in the past. New methods enable archaeologists to examine learning from skilled potters in childhood and learning from other skilled potters and objects later in life among the Ancestral Pueblos. Differences in learning and teaching frameworks have implications for the archaeological record. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A distinctive school of landscape archaeology is emerging in the American Southwest. The Southwest School, as here defined, has its roots in a unique set of historical relationships among archaeologists, ethnographers, indigenous people, and an intoxicating physical setting that has long provided scholarly inspiration. The most significant contribution of this school, however, is the manner in which it has begun to engage Native American intellectuals, not as data to be studied, but as interlocutors with distinct epistemological stances who have their own contributions to make toward the theorization of cultural landscapes generally. As such, the Southwest School stands poised to offer an important alternative to the more widely read landscape approaches currently popular in British archaeology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]