Pots and how they are made in Southeast Asia - Part 2 of 5
Channel: Archaeology Unit
Date: 2012-05-07

About the Talk
Dr. Leedom Lefferts and Louise Allison Cort (Curator, Asian Ceramics, Freer and Sackler Galleries, Smithsonian Institution) conducted an intensive study of the indigenous production of earthenware and stoneware pottery by surveying over 200 locations in mainland Southeast Asia (including Southern Yunnan, China, but excluding Myanmar (Burma). They preliminarily charted six types of earthenware and two types of stoneware production across the region and have presented and published over a dozen papers on the subject.

This presentation summarizes their research findings and emphasizes three issues: the natureof the research as "ethno-archaeological method"; "embodied" behavior as indicative of cultural continuity and change, vis-à-vis pot form and decoration (and the difficulties associated with making archaeological discoveries in this domain); and the impact of these findings on the understandings of accepted Southeast Asian linguistic, political, and socio-organizational mapped boundaries. It is through their research findings that they propose a history of technological production behaviors that will begin to provide a nuanced understanding of contact and migration across the diverse landscape that is mainland Southeast Asia.

About the Speaker
Dr. Leedom Lefferts is currently a Senior Research Fellow at the Asian Civilisations Museum in Singapore. He is working on a volume describing and analyzing the context of the unique long painted Vessantara scroll acquired by the Museum in 1996. He is a retired professor of anthropology from Drew University. His fieldwork has focused on mainland Southeast Asia since 1970, first in Thailand and then, following the demise of the "bamboo curtain", in other adjoining nations. Material culture has provided a thematic focus, "thinking through things" in order to understand human behavior. This began with the study of agriculture and household strategies in a Northeast Thai village context, expanded through using hand-woven textiles to understand the roles of women in social organization and Theravada Buddhism, and, with Louise Cort, a 20-year exploration of the embodied behaviors involved in earthenware and stoneware production. This work is now nearing completion.