The link between objects and the social and cultural behaviors responsible for their manufacture, distribution, meaning, and use remains one of the most difficult, if not contentious, parts of archaeological interpretation. This book presents case studies about the social dimensions of learning that lie behind objects. Centered around the notion of ‘communities of practice’, the book crosses disciplinary boundaries: six are archeological, two are ethnographic, and one uses a historical approach. Only two use data from Latin America; the remainder uses data from the Southwest (N = 2), the Southeast (N = 2), and Africa (N = 3).

As the book covers such diverse areas and disciplines, it might seem that it would not be relevant to the readers of Latin American Antiquity. To the contrary, the theme of the book focuses on the concepts of communities of practice, situated learning, constellations of practice, and associated concepts that can be applied in any area.

The first case study by Olivier Gosselain reconstructs the history of the Niger River Polychrome Tradition (Africa). He explores the contexts in which potters developed social relations and were exposed to practices that transformed their practice of potting. He shows how the circulation of people, things, and ideas within and between places channeled the propagation of their practices that varied as the result of the chaînes operatoires among the producers over a wide area, and were influenced by markets, marriage, social structures, geography, and migration along fertile valleys and main roads. A second factor contributing to this variability was the power relations that blocked the circulation of knowledge. Gosselain says that forms and decoration are structured by existing grammars and repertoires by shared patterns within a community, by the taste of clients in local markets, by practices in other material realms that have led to innovations, and by the development of regional stylistic variants. He concludes that the relative homogeneity and geographical scope of this style should not mislead one to believe that it is rooted in a long and coherent history.

Patricia Crown explores why vessels of two wares from the U.S. Southwest (White Mountain Redware and Cibola Whiteware) often used the same designs except for an orange slip on the redware. Both were made in the same villages and apparently by the same potters, yet redware vessels had few examples of involvement by learners; whiteware vessels had far more examples of crudely painted vessels, apparently produced by nascent potters. Redware vessels, Crown argues, were the products of potters who first learned how to make whiteware vessels either alone or in collaboration with other potters. Redware vessels, on the other hand, were the product of skilled potters who had access to secret knowledge of sources and production rights that were restricted during great social change when new migrants were moving southward from the northern Southwest. Using ethnographic information and a large number of vessels from museum collections, her work shows the methodological value of comparing large numbers of vessels of two different wares.

Elliot Blair focuses on diverse glass bead assemblages from colonial Spanish Florida that index multiple intersecting communities of practice, specifically communities of manufacturing and consumption. Using a social network approach to consider some of the scalar ambiguity inherent in the community of practice concept, Blair argues that interrelated communities of practice (production, distribution, and consumption) are better understood as unfolding into each other and across lived pathways, as a scaleless process of constellating practices.

Andrew Roddick explores how the reconfiguration of power relationships during a period of social and economic change affected learning in communities of potters in the Lake Titicaca Basin, Bolivia. His ultimate goal was to move beyond the traditional use of pottery to reveal the power relations of learned practices and the struggles and creativity inherent in everyday life in turbulent times that might relate to the emergence of the urban center of Tiwanaku at the end of the Late Formative (AD 450–1000).

Historian Mark Harris's article on the Lower Amazon uses historical data to show how learning patterns followed the path of the rivers. Amazonian archaeologists will recognize that this pattern is ancient, and it also accounts for the hypothetical pathways of language learning, the movement of the knowledge of certain pottery styles, and the preparation practices used for different varieties of manioc.

Ann Stahl's article on the communities in West Africa explores how communities and constellations of practice reconfigured themselves in relation to the dynamics from the thirteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, showing how circulations of people, objects, and knowledge contributed to continuities and discontinuities in ceramic production. In the end, Stahl argues that communities of practice, both nested and emergent, “crafted life in turbulent times by drawing on the known while creatively incorporating the novel as they grappled with the shifting terrains of connection, power, and violence of recent centuries in ways that archaeological assemblages hold promise to illuminate” (209).

Focusing on the notion of meaning in communities of practice, David Schoenbrun explores the emergence of a community of practice engaged with shrines dedicated to forging connections among dispersed communities of other practices such as ironwork, canoe-building, healing, and fishing along the shores of Lake Victoria in East Africa before AD 1000.

Barbara Mills extends the notion of community of practice to practices of consumption. Cuisines consist of the choices that people make in the way that food is prepared, in the type of containers in which it was served, and to whom it was served. Using late prehispanic period ceramics from the American Southwest, she shows how networks were created by the accumulation of choices made by communities of consumption, and maps these networks as webs of interaction of people and things across space and through time. The growth and disappearance of these networks over time reveal social relations at multiple social, temporal, and spatial scales.

Kenneth Sassaman's article on the experience of sea-level rise explores the archaeological residues on the gulf coast from ~5,000 years ago when settlements, cemeteries, monuments, and caches form a constellation of practice that culminates ~3,500 years ago in the Poverty Point culture of northeast Louisiana.

This book contains fascinating, creative, path-breaking, and methodologically unique chapters, but the lexical elaboration, resulting semantic complexity, and the use of quotes for cross-referencing similar ideas of other authors gets in the way of a clear and convincing discourse that might be useful for those who are not familiar with the terminology that emerged from the authors’ face-to-face community of practice that led to the present volume.