Ceramics and group identities

Abstract

Southern African Iron Age archaeology has engaged with identity issues using ceramic evidence as the basis for culture group definition, chronology and determining origins and movements of people. Archaeological research should go beyond typologically defined ceramic styles to explore material culture meanings and group interactions. I argue that ceramics communicated social messages to their users, and thus archaeologists should borrow from communication theory to understand, for example, why pottery was decorated. It is from this decoration that archaeologists can obtain social meanings straddling across or beyond ethnic identities.