pottery use
post are indeed tools but they can also be sings and symbols.Thus, the study of pottery use requires a mix of soft and hard-science techniques. A very profitable area of research has been to apply a materials science-like approach to understand the relationship between ceramic manufacture and use. This research focuses on understanding how potters designed their vessels to meet the performance characteristics associated with cooking, storing water, transport, and other functions related to the use of pottery as a tool. Critics have charged, incorrectly, that this focus on the technical attributes related to design and functional performance privileges the utilitarian explanations for pottery design and change at the expense of nonutilitarian, symbolic, or cultural performance characteristics. The focus on what has been referred to as techno-function, however, came about because of unsatisfactory explanations for pottery design variability. One objective of the research I have conducted, for example, was to determine how a particular temper or surface treatment related to a vessel's performance in cooking. Previous to these experiments little was know about the relationship between pottery design and use. To explain ceramic variation, investigators either offered untested utilitarian connections or simplistic " cultural" explanations. It is only after a long series of experiments that we can now begin explanations of ceramic variability and change with a core set of principles about the relationships between technical attributes and performance. But this dose not imply that all pottery design can be explained solely by techno-functional performance, it has never been suggested that all design variability should focus in these aspects alone. However, explanations for ceramic design that privilege the social, cultural, or symbolic and do not consider techno-functional performance at all are immediately suspect, The technical properties are not just a trivial "side effect" as proposed by Gosselain and Smith, nor can they be considered as the end products of people making engineer-like decisions somehow removed from their cultural and social milieu. In this volume, the issue of pottery use is explored in the American Southwest, Mesoamerica, India, and Greece.