This pioneering ethnoarchaeological study is of contemporary ceramic production and consumption in several villages in the Los Tuxtlas region of Mexico. While many archaeologists have identified ceramic production zones in the archaeological record, their identifying criteria have often been vague and impressionistic. The present book's contribution is to use ethnographic research to suggest how archaeologists might consistently recognise ceramic manufacturing. It also places ceramic production in larger cultural contexts and provides details of the ecology, production, distribution, use,...

Archaeological settlement patterns the ways in which ancient people distributed themselves across a natural and cultural landscape provide the central theme for this long-overdue update to our understanding of the Mexican Gulf lowlands Olmec to Aztec offers the only recent treatment of the region that considers its entire prehistory from the second millennium B.C. to A.D. 1519. The editors have assembled a distinguished group of international scholars, several of whom here provide the first widely available English-language account of ongoing research. Several studies present...