Cultural attraction in pottery practice: Group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities

Area of Science:

• Archaeology
• Anthropology
• Material Culture Studies

Background:

• Ceramic artifacts are key indicators of cultural dynamics.
• Cultural traits spread through selective transmission and biased transformation.
• Understanding how specific community practices shape material culture is essential.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate if distinct community-specific morphological features emerge in ceramic vessels.
• To test the hypothesis that cultural habits influence artifact creation even with unfamiliar models.
• To analyze the role of morphogenesis in the development of community-specific pottery styles.

Main Methods:

• A cross-cultural field experiment involving professional potters from three distinct communities.
• Potters were instructed to reproduce unfamiliar ceramic vessel shapes using wheel-throwing techniques.
• Morphometric analysis was applied to both the final vessel shapes and the underlying morphogenesis process.

Main Results:

• Potters produced vessels with greater morphometric variation among communities than within communities.
• This community-specific divergence was observed in both the final vessel shapes and the developmental process (morphogenesis).
• The variation in vessel morphology was non-random and reliably differed between communities.

Conclusions:

• Community-specific habits in fashioning clay lead to the collective alignment of ceramic vessel morphology.
• Material culture, like pottery, reflects underlying cultural transmission and transformation dynamics.
• The study provides empirical evidence for how craft practices embed community-specific characteristics into artifacts.