Hands to the Potter’s Wheel: A Case of Technological Change in Pottery Production (Pomaire, Chile)

Abstract

This paper analyses the technological changes which have taken place in the pottery community of Pomaire for the last centuries. Since 1999 a series of ethnographic field work trips, including surveys and interviews of living potters, have been made to reconstruct the oral history of the area. Simultaneously, different written sources documenting the technological systems used by this population from 1820 (Graham 1823; Valenzuela 1950; Valdes X, Matta P. Oficios y trabajos de las mujeres de Pomaire. CEM. Pehuén, Santiago de Chile, 1986) were consulted to provide a historical context and diachronic perspective to our analyses. The transformation of an indigenous, hand-made, domestic and female pottery-production strategy into a mainly male, wheel-made and workshop-based model can be clearly seen here as a result of economic and territorial factors. Based on the guidelines of the Anthropology of Techniques (Lemonnier, P. Elements for an anthropology of technology. University of Michigan, Museum of Anthropology, 1992; Gosselain, O. Archaeol Method and Theory 7(3):187–217, 2000, amongst others), such changes demand explanations different from merely economic arguments because other pottery communities in the area – such as Pilén or Quinchamalí – have continued using indigenous pottery-making systems until now. Hence, social and ideological factors should be considered. They will explain, for instance, why innovations such as kilns, potter’s wheels or grinding machines were adapted, at least at the outset, to the local reality.

The number of communities of potters who make traditional ceramic forms, using traditional materials and traditional techniques, is fast dwindling. Few if any of these peoples or their craft products have remained untouched during the past six centuries of colonial, missionary, and other institutional expansionism around the globe. Third and Fourth World societies have been rapidly incorporated into twentieth-century international economic and political structures, transforming the potter’s craft, or in some cases, bringing its extinction.

(Rice 1987: 449)