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Ceramic Production among Small-Scale and Mobile Hunters and Gatherers: A Case Study from the Southwestern Great Basin

Archaeologists often stress the importance of sedentism, large population sizes, and the economy of scale in the development of ceramic technologies worldwide. Yet pottery making is known among many mobile and small-scale societies that make only small numbers of pots. Unfortunately, we know very little about how this technology was organized in such societies. Using Instrumental Neutron Activation Analysis we explore how pottery production, distribution, and consumption were organized within one such group, the Numa (i.e., Paiute and Shoshone) of the southwestern Great Basin. Results suggest that pots were produced and used locally, that exchange of pots was minimal, and that production was organized at an individual or family level. The creation of regional distribution networks by specialized potters, as proposed by Julian Steward (1933), is not supported. As a result we also question the importance of an economy of scale of pottery production in this particular case.