work wrapping up

my work is coming to a close here in oaxaca but i got to work with some really cool materials, the research from with will problably turn into my senior thesis. basically this is what i did:

back in the mid 1960`s archaeologists defined a ceramic chronology for both the valley of oaxaca and the mixteca that unfortunately has not been refined since. a ceramic chronology is basically a listing that defines certain pottery attributes to certain time periods. this is usually done when pottery is found in context with either inscribed texts that include dates (the peoples of ancient mexico where absolutely obsessed with time so this is suprisingly common) or with materials that can be carbon dated (essentially anything that has surviving organic matter or has been burned). once a chronology is defined for an area, archaeologists can then compare their findings to date the occupations of their sites. because many areas where occupied continually for hundreds or even thousands of years at many sites you can find a big chunk of the entire chronology present. now, like i said before, the chronology for the mixteca has not really been updated in a while so the catergories are extremely broad with some of them spanning hundreds of years. it would be like if we classiffied all the chairs ever made over the course of american history into one phase. you would have old time rocking chairs and modern desk chairs all in the same group and you could only say ¨well, this chair was made between 1492 and 2008¨. now obviously this accounts for a huge amount of variation and we need to narrow it down. one of the largest phases first defined was the cruz phase which occurs in the early formative period of mesoamerica about 600-300 BC. now the cruz has been split into smaller pieces, early cruz, middle cruz, and late cruz or cruz A, cruz B, and cruz C. but even these catergories are extremely broad and we are still trying to refine them. i´ve been working with materials that archaeologists are beggining to call cruz D which is essentially the second half of cruz C just before the transition into the yucuita phase in which massive urbanization occured in oaxaca around 300-250 BC.

within cruz D we find several types of pottery. the first, and problably most common, are tanwares, which are essentially exactly what they sound like. they are bowls and pots made from a very coarse tan colored clay which they formed into a brown paste refered to as cafe. they are often simply decorated with slip, thin bands of a different colored clay that are put on just before the pots are fired. the slips on tanwares are often a red or orange color and are called simply "red on tans." also common in cruz D, and of much higher quality are gray wares. gray wares are made from a gray clay paste which is generally much finer (less gritty) than cafe pastes used for tanwares. gray wares are also much better fired, tanwares often look "uncooked¨ in the middle, and are generally finished more carefully. in terms of finishing gray wares are almost always finely burnished (rubbed with a round stone until they have a shiny surface) and often decorated with incised lines either in stripes or forming geometric patterns.

graywares and tanwares occur in other phases though, so it is not just these types of pottery that define cruz D. much of what actually defines the phase are the pastes. tanware pastes for example are generally much grittier in cruz d than in later phases like the yucuita phase. vessel form is another tip off. in general tanwares in cruz d are actually thinner than in later occuring phases, whereas gray wares continue to get thinner over time. firing is also a factor with graywares becoming very well fired in cruz D as opposed to much earlier phases. certain designs are another telling sign. in cruz D there was a real fad for what we call differential burnishing which is when they burnished certain areas but not others to create patterns on the vessel surface. certain geometric patterns are also telling of the phase such as the banner design (a carved design that looks like little pendants), the butterfly design (hourglass shapes with cross hatched lines inside them), and the shark tooth design (a series of lines with downward facing triangles that look alot like sharks teeth. slip colors are another clue, with only certain colors appearing during certain phases.

it´s all alot to handle, but i´ve been working with some cruz D materials from etlatongo to help better understand how to define and describe this phase so that it can be incorporated into the work at other sites. the names for the butterfly and sharktooth designs are actually of my creation and they are going to be used in further analysis of these materials. overall though if you happen to be in mexico and you find a few pot sherds (which is pretty likely in many areas they are still all over the place, even on the surface) here´s how you know it is cruz D:

- it has a rough and gritty cafe paste
- it is a very nicely finished grayware that has differentially burnished patterns
- it has a banner, sharktooth, or butterfly design
- it is a red on tan with a well defined slipped rim and is thinner than yacuita phase red on tans
- it is not cruz C or yucuita phase but belongs to the late formative.
- it looks like it is a cruz D piece

those last two are really the most important, it just takes alot of time to get to know this stuff and eventually you can just sort of tell. i´m not quite there yet i don´t think, but if you poured a pile of stuff out on the table i could problably pick out most of the stuff that was cruz D. unfortunately cruz D is just one small phase among many that exist here and seasoned archaeologists can go through an entire table of stuff and only have uncertainty about a few pieces in regards to what phase they belong to. the real trouble is not putting stuff into the phases but making the phases more precise so that we can narrow down the broad range of the phases within the chronology.