Crafting a shared history of learning: Pottery making and the building of agropastoral communities (Argentina, 200-850 CE)

Abstract

For many decades, anthropological archaeologists have investigated early villager societies in the Southern Andes, especially in regions that experienced the formation of larger settlements, politico-religious centers, and eventually, centralized polities. This paper contributes to the reconstruction of socio-material strategies and trajectories of early Andean smaller-scale, egalitarian agropastoral settlements by comparing the technological choices embedded in pottery manufacture in the Tafí Valley (Tucumán, Argentina, 200–850 CE). Evidence from these smaller communities demonstrates an extensive occupation by agropastoral groups living in dispersed hamlets. These early farmers maintained local foodways, but shared similar mortuary and architectural traditions. To further investigate the crafting of social relations between these small villages, this paper explores how Andean farmers and herders articulated difference and similarity through shared learning histories, in this case, of making pots.With data from three contemporary residential sites located in northern (La Bolsa, La Ciénega) and southern (Las Carreras) parts of the Tafi Valley, we apply a suite of elemental, mineralogical, and archaeological techniques (including pXRF, optical petrography, morphological reconstruction of vessels, and forming marks) to elucidate and compare the operational sequences of pottery making. Results reveal that small-scale agropastoral settlements, even separated by small distances, mobilized different material and immaterial resources in mutually intelligible combinations enacting a constellation of potting practices that allowed them to balance the tensions between similarity and difference at the regional level.