Native American women of the Greater American Southwest understood ceramic technology long before they began manufacturing ceramic containers. Ceramic...

Native American women of the Greater American Southwest understood ceramic technology long before they began manufacturing ceramic containers. Ceramic containers appeared over a millennium after the introduction of agriculture among southwestern Native American groups that had previously relied solely upon foraging, and approximately eight hundred years after the archaeological record indicates ceramic figurines first appeared in the region. To explain this lag, anthropologist James Brown proposed that the manufacture of ceramic containers began as these groups became increasingly sedentary and more reliant upon agriculture and developed greater need for storage containers. He argued further that since pottery making fit easily into women's schedules, the labor of making containers had negligible costs. Subsequent research has shown that pottery making exacerbated the scheduling problems of women, whose child-care responsibilities, foraging activities, and other contributions to subsistence were already greater than during the preceramic period. Other evidence, however, does seem to support Brown's argument that increased need for containers was important to the inception of pottery making. Pottery containers provided a means of storing and cooking food that enhanced the nutritional yield of a given crop. As southwestern populations became more reliant on agriculture for subsistence, they had to increase their crops' nutritional yield, since low population densities impeded expansion of field systems.