To Pot or Not to Pot: Understanding Technological Investment in Ceramics and Marine Mammal Oil Rendering in Kodiak, Alaska

• Main Author: Groat, Elizabeth
• Format: Text
• Language: unknown
• Published: DigitalCommons@USU 2024
• Subjects: archaeology; technological investment; human behavioral ecology; pottery; ceramics adoption; complex hunter-gatherers; experimental archaeology; Kodiak; coastal Alaska; Gulf of Alaska; Alaskan pottery; hunter-gatherer pottery; hunter-gatherer ceramics; coastal hunter-gatherers; museum collections; hunter-gatherer archaeology; marine mammal oil; food processing technology; traditional foodways; traditional knowledge; Alaska Native foodways; Anthropology; Archaeological Anthropology; Social and Behavioral Sciences; Social and Cultural Anthropology; alutiiq; Archipelago; Alaska
• Online Access: https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/etd2023/260; https://doi.org/10.26076/1317-f372; https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/context/etd2023/article/1266/viewcontent/SOCAetd2024Aug_Groat_Elizabeth.pdf

Why do groups choose to use certain technologies, but not others? This study focuses on an especially confusing instance of this question: the adoption of pottery in Kodiak, Alaska. This event was strange for two reasons. First, by AD 1500, when Alutiiq ancestors in the Kodiak Archipelago began making pottery, their neighbors on the mainland had already been doing it for centuries—so why did they wait so long? Second, pottery is also only found in the south of the islands—so why did some people use it, but not others? Whale and seal are more abundant in southern Kodiak, so one potential explanation is that the pottery was made because southern villages were starting to render larger amounts of marine mammal oil. I reconstructed the pottery of Kodiak to try to understand whether this hypothesis makes sense. Are Alutiiq pots actually a better way to mass-produce marine mammal oil than other traditional rendering methods? What conditions should favor the use of pottery? This study lays out what I've learned about Kodiak pottery and what this tells us about what was going on in the region, as well as the implications for our understanding of pottery use in general.