When answering this question, you may give an answer in a dozen parts: your name, where you’re from, your heritage (West African, Indigenous American, Irish, English, German, etc.), your gender, what you like to do on the weekends, what communities you associate with, even your age group or generation—all of these can be considered a part of your identity. For archeologists and anthropologists, identity is an important topic to understand and encapsulates how people are connected to each other, how ideas and goods are exchanged, when one group of people moves into (or away) from an area, how cultures change and adapt when encountering new cultures, how people understand themselves, and how the people of today are connected to their ancestors.
But how is identity defined within archeology? There’s a plethora of markers within the archeological record that we can use to track identity, as we can’t simply ask the people of the past about their identity. How they made their tools and what tools they made, how they made their pottery, what plants they grew and gathered, what animals they hunted and domesticated, what clothes they made and how they made them, where people made their communities, how people built their houses, what art they made and their rules for that art, their political systems, their kinship systems, and how all of these ideas were passed from one generation to the next—all of these help to build a cultural identity. Many of these can be tracked directly within the archeological record, and others can be inferred from the evidence left behind.
Unfired Caddo Bottle by Chase Kanwinhut Earles. Acc. No. 2024-0110.
For a more concrete example, let’s consider ceramics—more specifically, Caddo ceramics. The Caddos have been making incredible pottery for around 1,000 years and, because of the wealth of information within the Caddo archeological record, we can track changes within their pottery and define a broad style of pottery that is Caddo pottery. For example, it’s possible to get a broad time range for a piece depending on what tempering material was added to the clay when forming the vessel. In general, bone is the earliest, followed by grog (crushed up pieces of fired pottery), and mussel shell the most recent tempering material. Using more precise dating methods, and looking for cases of mixed tempering material, we can get, and have gotten, an idea of how tempering practices changed in Caddo pottery production across the entire Caddo cultural area. Using vessel forms and decorative treatment, we can also track geographic areas where particular kinds of vessels were made, suggesting that these designs were important to people in a specific area and a possible shared cultural identity existed among the people making them. It’s important to note, however, that the existence of pots in an area doesn’t necessarily imply that the people there made them; pots aren’t always people after all (Whitaker, 2023). Through looking at these aspects, we can track identity in the deep past to the present.
Of course, the Caddo are still making pottery. Jeri Redcorn and Chase Kanwinhut Earles are two potters who, using traditional methods of pottery construction and decoration, find connection to their ancestors and Caddo identity through their artwork. Their methods are largely based upon archeological research into Caddo pottery, as there was, unfortunately, a period where Caddo ceramics were considered a lost art form. Both are nationally recognized for their artwork, having pieces in the Smithsonian and the Dallas Museum of Art. Both artists also use their ceramics to strengthen their Caddo identity—from naming pieces using Caddo words, to making vessels in intricate traditional forms and designs, to making pieces that both explore traditional Caddo stories and pieces that experiment with Indigenous Futurism. Redcorn and Earles show that Caddo identity is alive and well today, changing as it ever has, but still rooted in the traditions founded in the deep past.
Further Reading
Earles, Chase Kanwinhut. 2021. Ancestors and Identity: Reconnection and Evolution. In Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions, edited by Duncan P. McKinnon, Jeffrey S. Girard, and Timothy K. Perttula, pp. 290-300. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
Redcorn, Jeri. 2021. Caddo Pottery: Connecting with My Ancestors. In Ancestral Caddo Ceramic Traditions, edited by Duncan P. McKinnon, Jeffrey S. Girard, and Timothy K. Perttula, pp. 279-289. Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge.
In this series we plan to highlight the many and various things that Are Archeology, from Art to Zoology and everything in between. We hope you enjoy learning a bit more about the variety of things that archeologists do and specialize in and maybe it will inspire you to be an archeologist even if you love learning about things in another field. You can find all the entries here.
