Arcillas and Alfareros: Clay and Temper Mining Practices in the Lake Titicaca Basin

This chapter aims to integrate archaeological and ethnoarchaeological research on ceramic production in the Lake Titicaca basin. Drawing on over 60 years of scholarship exploring the early stages of ceramic manufacture, we examine the acquisition of clays at quarries and the subsequent processing of these raw materials. Investigations into clay quarries have often focused on the availability of raw materials appropriate for pottery production. This research has included pedestrian survey for clays and sediments, and geochemical and mineralogical work on the quality of clays (Bishop et al. 1982; Neff et al. 1992). While such work is unquestionably useful (and unfortunately still rare in some regions), the dynamic nature of clays makes defining historic and prehistoric sources difficult. As a result, many archaeologists have considered these early technical stages through other means. For instance, research on prehistoric ceramics has long included careful analysis of ceramic pastes—the mixture of the aplastic inclusions and the plastic clay components of ceramics (for a good summary, see Arnold 2000). These findings have permitted for variability in local recipes to be correlated with regional and sometimes local deposits. In this work some have deployed sophisticated analytical tools in the laboratory to examine the techno-functional aspects of particular technological choices at quarry sites. This research has tended to focus on the relative performance of particular materials under a range of conditions (Bronitsky and Hamer 1986; Skibo et al. 1989; Summerhayes 1997).