Pottery economics: A Kalinga ethnoarchaeological study.

Abstract

This ethnoarchaeological study explores the economics of pottery production and distribution in the Kalinga village of Dalupa in the northern Philippines. For individual Dalupa potters, pottery production is a part-time craft specialization that fits around an intensive cultivation schedule. For the regional economic system in which Dalupa participates, pottery production is a community-based specialization that provides numerous settlements with much-needed goods. This model of community-based specialization, in which households and communities pursue multiple types of productive specialization, is common among traditional societies that anthropologists study. Yet surprisingly little is known about conditions under which village-based specialization develops. Still less is known about the factors that encourage a part-time production system to evolve into a full-time system, since ethnographic examples indicate that productive intensification characterizes a wide range of societies. Historical and social contexts of Dalupa ceramic production are explored as they affect the nature of its production system. Resource access and production parameters that archaeologists employ (e.g., scale, intensity) are influenced by capitalist penetration into the area, social relations, and the level of tribal warfare. Household pottery production scale is affected by the availability of alternative income-generating activities, which fluctuate in response to externally-imposed pressures toward development in the Cordillera highlands. Examination of Dalupa production scale (i.e., levels of inputs and outputs) over an annual cycle reveals that variability within the producer work force is related to differential economic pressures. Analyses of Dalupa production intensity (or the relative level of inputs per production entity) concentrate on dimensional variability of cooking pots. Comparisons at the inter-community and intra-community level evaluate widely-held assumptions regarding the relationship between production intensity and product standardization. This ethnoarchaeological case study provides detailed information on the relationship between production scale and distributional range in small-scale systems. Economic personalism operates in all aspects of the Dalupa pottery exchange network. Dalupa ceramics circulate within a multi-centric economy. These two processes affect the formal variation in the material record of pottery distribution. Investigating both production and distribution processes within a single economic system illuminates our understanding of prehistoric pottery economics.