Two recent tomes pursue combined sociocultural anthropology and ethnographic field methods to explore craft production for complementing prehispanic archaeological inference through distinct yet interrelated ceramic ecology theoretical perspectives. With a collective eight decades of academic inquiry, both studies offer unique windows into traditional indigenous ecological niche adaptations, provide profound insight into raw materials procurement, and use knowledge strategies, in addition to seasonal part-time domestic and more full-time intensive community-based production schemes. Williams and Arnold also note ever-changing global market demands for improvising new formal repertoires and nontraditional surface-finish requests.

Williams's thoughtfully illustrated manuscript begins with world pottery production studies, in addition to peripheral Mesoamerican traditions adjacent to Western Mexican contexts, as thematic backdrops before presenting earlier and more recent ethnographic research in Michoacán. The second chapter provides an impressive overview of previous theoretical perspectives that finally land within intradisciplinary processual materialism and ethnographic analogy (citing outstanding scholars L. Binford and R. Gould), ceramic ecology (D. Arnold, C. Kolb, and P. Rice), and cultural systems research (M. Schiffer) for archaeological inquiry from a context, site, and regional perspective. This richly eclectic theoretical perspective combines ceramic ecology and context-specific spatial analysis into anthropological archaeology explanations based on domestic units and their corresponding—and oftentimes overlapping—activity areas. Williams deftly weaves these academic substrates into a compelling argument for incorporating modern ethnographic observance as suggested bridging methods for understanding absent intangible cultural components in the archaeological record to serve as points of departure for reconstructing ancient craft creation processes.

Williams next defines ceramic ethnoarchaeology and ceramic ecology studies as those that stress

This framework then allows him to delve into two traditional craft-producing rural enclaves—one in nearby Jalisco and the other in Michoacán, which are both states in Western Mexico. Part-time ceramic production in Teponahuasco, Jalisco, for example, continues to reflect a transgenerational community domestic pursuit. Whereas a single household generally fashions one kind of mold-shaped or combined coil-and-mold composite vessel manufacture technique, each domestic unit builds and fires their wares in wood-burning kilns located within internal house-lot confines. Most nuclear or extended-family ceramic production components also represent full-time agriculturalists who seasonally manufacture wares when principal food subsistence activities allow for dry-season complementary economic strategies. During five- to six-month rainy seasonal weather patterns, agricultural subsistence needs preclude time devoted to craft production, causing most domestic units to abandon resource procurement, vessel fabrication, and firing. Only those extended families that possess greater physical and/or human resource means to sustain economic growth and stability—through more ample spatial areas for producing, storing, and/or firing wares in inclement climatic conditions—might pursue full-time pottery assembly activities.

Based on these ethnographic observations, Williams then transforms this information into modern-day house-lot spatial analyses to provide an anthropological strategy that relates material cultural studies within and among family or extended domestic group living contexts to create possible archaeological signatures for pottery creation behaviors. He states that these particular systemic contexts are important for archaeological interpretation by allowing a processual methodological view of the past, citing Schiffer's theoretical model from the 1970s that strives to document modern behavior and its material consequences. Those data provide the compelling evidence from which to bridge past conduct with material contexts in order to enable a more complete understanding of the cultural construction and use of domestic spatial settings. Each processual step in clay procurement, mold-made manufacture, drying and slip finishing, kiln firing, post-firing decoration, and storage activities is carefully documented through both photographs and actual house-lot spatial layout maps. Williams also explores possible archaeological signature caveats for these actions by noting caution in spatial interpretation, because, according to the author, not all activities that form part of the ceramic process have the same potential to be recorded in archaeological contexts (p. 79). One particular problem encountered in defining activity areas within the larger domestic unit from the ethnographic record is identifying the “archaeological visibility” of those events. Williams notes two possible options for solving this conundrum. In one, particular multitasking spatial settings tend to be more fluid. Another suggests material signatures are less conclusive for these contexts due to similar tool kits that undergo multiple production uses for different domestic or craft activities. Meticulously cleaned loci also tend to erase material traces for all activity signatures.

Linking these ethnographic spatial signatures to the archaeological record at the site of Tzintzuntzan, the late Postclassic Tarascan urban center located within the immediate Lake Pátzcuaro region, however, continues to be a problematic and inconclusive endeavor to date. Although ceramic and lithic remains from elite and plebian residential areas suggest that food preparation, serving, and storage pursuits were probably carried out in these contexts, none of those loci display activity areas with possible pottery production signatures. Nor has specific evidence for these contexts been positively identified to determine production activities in neighborhood or calpulli administrative groups. From these elements, Williams concludes that Tzintzuntzan's initial growth, unlike other Mesoamerican urban centers, may have been generated by political rather than economic factors (p. 118).

Following a more linguistic, anthropological, and ethnographic-fusion research design, Maya Potters’ Indigenous Knowledge: Cognition, Engagement, and Practice centers on how craft expertise not only reflects the deep knowledge that indigenous peoples acquire in their particular environmental context but also provides a means to identify with and encourage sustainability in population-density-stressed environments that might potentially suffer from dwindling resources (p. 3). In this particular study, Arnold employs an ingeniously holistic perspective through engagement theory, which, like cultural ecology, focuses on how cultures successfully manage environmental, social, and political conditions that link human behavior, adaptation, and use strategies with biotic and abiotic material resources in their surrounding natural realm (pp. 8–9). Pottery craft production operates by using a basic behavioral chain of processes to link human agency and knowledge of traditional and culturally acquired skills with engaging and molding immediately available materials. Engagement theory offers a beneficial approach to describe how potters’ indigenous knowledge relates to many contemporary ethnoarchaeological matters: how potters categorize their raw materials, what the culturally relevant characteristics of those materials are, and where to find them in the landscape. The author's hands-on and study-by-doing approach delves into all cultural and technological choices used in sustainable ecological production, and personally acquires more intimate knowledge of raw materials physical properties, habitual working postures, motor skills, and aural, visual, and tactile feedback insights (p. 10). Engagement theory includes choosing specific environmental and weather-related components by employing feedback from all successful or unfruitful stages of production. In this craft fabrication process, all choices coalesce into positive or negative feedback, which ultimately influences artistic outcomes.

Arnold's methodology involved several different approaches that evolved over time, trial, modification, and execution during several subsequent field sessions over the last half century. The initial organizing system for data collection focused on linguistic terminology through informant interviews, from which Arnold compiled a comprehensive inventory of all expressions in Yucatec Maya pertaining to pottery production. This became the basis for his master's thesis. During the early 1960s, at the peak of ethnoscience theoretical currents, Arnold's anthropological research compiled data through eliciting and organizing linguistic categories that informants themselves distinguished in their own vernacular. Distinct contemporary processual paradigms, however, eclipsed this theoretic framework less than a decade later. Due to those conceptual shifts at that moment, Arnold's cognitive inquiry morphed into a materialistic, processual one through participant-observation techniques that actively engaged with potters to better understand their craft. Changing tack for coherent reasons, so as to avoid unnecessary academic bias or noise, the author revamped previously recovered information by channeling a new and intensive research method through virtually mastering all ceramic production stages. This operational shift to engagement theory notes that although language is an essential tool to understand cultural behavior, using only those semantic categories to describe potter activities proved to be incomplete or could skew interpretation, particularly regarding the entire firing stage. Arnold's actual participation in this elaboration stage convinced him that then-current ethnoarchaeological methodologies based solely on craftsperson interviews could not provide an in-depth knowledge of technological processes (p. 41).

Arnold then addresses Ticul, Yucatán's, immediate abiotic, biotic, and geophysical properties that congealed into a distilled landscape for pottery production. He also refers to this particular niche as a “taskscape.” By this, he means that within this discretely delimited, unique study area, potters’ knowledge and engagement with their surroundings constitutes one of the most wide-ranging foundations for classifying (1) all raw materials (soil, temper) and particularly specific kinds of kiln combustibles or wood; (2) their scientific, common, and Maya names; and (3) the burning and temperature properties for each. Three successive chapters follow concrete, detailed descriptions and illustrations of all materials and processes involved in pottery production. They also address the potters’ engagement with and precise raw materials selections for obtaining optimum results in paste preparation, vessel formation, formal drying, firing, and post-firing finishing techniques. These exhaustive environmental overviews comprise one of the most complete raw materials inventory in ceramic production documented to date.

Despite both Williams's and Arnold's meticulously crafted “taskscapes” derived from in-depth ethnoarchaeological pottery studies in Michoacán and Yucatán, some nagging questions remain unanswered. As one of the most ubiquitous commodities produced by ancient peoples for millennia, documenting precise loci in the archaeological record where each of those production processes conclusively occurred has to date yielded few detailed contexts in Western Mexico or throughout the greater Maya area. Unless otherwise refuted, extensive kiln technology practice and use in precolumbian settings are curiously absent. Open-air firing spaces present a seemingly insurmountable obstacle to finally encounter both specific studio contexts and physical or chemical signatures within activity areas in domestic or community-based workshops generally lying outside major and minor architectural centers—as some recent precolumbian ceramic studies have so carefully documented. Ironically, although chemical analyses have positively identified paste variant clusters utilized by attached elite palace school production traditions in the Central and Southern Lowlands, additional architectural and archaeological contexts in other sites and areas need to be unearthed.

Furthermore, although Williams and Arnold also call attention to recent craft trends that undermine time-honored quality artisan procurement and production strategies based on long-term apprenticeship service to potters within extended families or other kinds of social production collectives. Industrializing a once unique, high quality, artisan pursuit tends to foster traditional form surface finish substitutions, in addition to intensified demand for certain clay and rare-earth temper compositions that foment unsustainable collateral resource exploitation. Unfortunately, contemporary economic gains and labor specialization have eclipsed traditional raw materials source reserves, diminished quasi-sustainability strategies, and weakened highly qualified artisan vocational training by attrition or, as both authors note, due to younger generations’ waning interest or involvement in pottery production. Rather than dedicating time and energy to traditional procurement strategies, most potters now obtain their raw materials from local entrepreneurs who lack specific, time-honored knowledge about special clay sources, temper quarries, firewood specificities, or other physical and chemical qualities necessary for optimum ceramic production outcomes. Both authors suggest these phenomena are perhaps an ongoing saga to modern educational programs that suppress cultural practices and indigenous language competency in children and young adults. Traditional ceramic production, unfortunately, seems destined to languish rather than proudly provide an alternative, cost-effective source for designing local community well-being and sustainable domestic pursuits or community-based development strategies. Combining these traditional cultural pursuits with other low-impact ecotourism options might also help to mitigate the effects of modern global-market economic expansion in rural Mexico.