Pottery ethnoarchaeology in the Central Maya Highlands /

This is a thoroughly revised doctoral dissertation on the production, use, and discard of pottery in several Maya communities in the southern Chiapas Highlands of Mexico, based on a study in 1978 and 1979 as part of the Coxoh Ethnoarchaeological Project of Simon Fraser University. It offers an excellent overview of pottery making in Tzeltal communities and provides a modern assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of ethnoarchaeology--an approach to studying the past by looking at modern behavior. Deal explores ranges in modern behaviors to suggest reasonable expectations for variation in past behaviors. Several of the areas explored are households as production, consumption, and depositional units, assuming that understanding the variation in how modern households function as units can be used as proxies for the past. Some archaeologists, including this reviewer, have problems with using the present as a proxy for the past, but even if one does not subscribe to the approach, it is difficult to overlook the value of Deal's book for what it tells about significant variation in modern pottery-making behaviors. It follows in the tradition of William Longacre and James Skibo's Kalinga Ethnoarchaeology (CH, Feb' 96) and Skibo's Pottery Function (1992). Extremely well illustrated and indexed; two useful appendixes on terms and pottery-form classification. Advanced undergraduates and graduate students. M. J. O'Brien; University of Missouri--Columbia