By Christopher A. Pool
I may have first met Charlie Kolb in a Denver hotel bar in 1985. The occasion, innocently enough, was the 50th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, and I was delivering my first paper at a professional conference, coauthored with Ronald Kneebone, “Archaeological Investigations of Ceramic Production: A Recent Discovery at Comoapan, Veracruz, Mexico.” Ron’s professor, and the director of the project we both worked on in southern Veracruz, Mexico, was Robert Santley, a professor at the University of Mexico, and an old friend of Charlies from their time as graduate students at Penn State. The next year Charlie and Louana Lackey inaugurated the long-running Ceramic Ecology symposium at the 1986 American Anthropological Association, and, three years later, I suspect more on the strength of Robert Santley’s recommendation than anything Charlie saw in my earlier presentation, I delivered a paper in Ceramic Ecology IV. And so, like so many of us, I entered the most enduring and personally satisfying professional network of my career – a welcoming web spun by Charlie and Louana, and maintained by their successors, Sandra Lorena de Varela and Kostalena Michelaki. Unlike the spider’s web that benefits only the weaver, this one has nourished scores of archaeologists, archaeometricians, geoarchaeologists, ethnoarchaeologists, ethnohistorians, and art historians, bound by common interests in people’s interactions with one another and the environment through the medium of ceramics.
By the time that I presented in my first Ceramic Ecology meeting I had become familiar with some of Charlie’s many intellectual contributions, as I was writing my dissertation and beginning to co-edit Ceramic Production and Distribution: An Integrated Approach with George J. Bey, III. Because my dissertation work was based in Mesoamerica, at a site with strong ties to Teotihuacan, I first encountered Charlie’s oeuvre through his work on the Teotihuacan trade ware, Thin Orange. Charlie’s petrographic analysis of 4,370 (!) Thin Orange sherds from William T. Sanders’ Teotihuacan Valley Project confirmed that the vast majority were produced outside of the Valley, and his characteristically clearheaded formulation and assessment of a series of postulates allowed him to suggest modes of exchange for different varieties via Teotihuacan’s extensive trade networks. The analytical clarity Charlie exemplified in this early work has continued to influence my own approach to understanding ceramic production and exchange.
Others can better attest to the importance of Charlie’s empirical work in Central Asia and the northeastern United States, although I did have the opportunity to comment one of Charlie’s northeast papers as a discussant in the 1997 Ceramic Ecology symposium. The paper, which reported on a collection of 72 white clay pipes (in 280 fragments) from a single early 19th century shipment at Barcelona Harbor, New York, stands for me as an exemplar of Charlie’s meticulous approach to analysis and “thick description” evaluating the collection with respect to typologies, chronology, place(s) of origin, manufacturing techniques, craft specialization, and transport. The “read” version of the paper ran to six single-spaced pages, but I read the entire 51 page manuscript. My comments included this one: “Kolb’s exhaustive investigation into white clay pipes of Eropean and American manufacture raises important questions regarding stylistc and metric serrations of this very specialized artifact form, including the famous bore-hole regression formulae of Harrington and Binford,” which does not come close to capturing the breadth of Charlie’s investigation.
It should also be recognized that Charlie has provided a tremendous amount of selfless service to archaeology and archaeological science by sharing his voracious appetite for reading through his compilations and reviews of books forChoice Reviews, the SAS Bulletin, La Tinaja, and a wide range of journals. Always fair and informative, I know I can trust a Kolb review.
If Thomas Huxley was Charles Darwin’s bulldog, then Charlie Kolb has been Fred Matson’s (albeit an amiable and enthusiastic one). Charlie went beyond his mentor, though in the brilliant (and lengthy) “Ceramic Ecology in Retrospect: A Critical Review of Methodology and Results,” where he laid forth his vision of a holistic ceramic ecology that encompasses behavioral, economic, social, political and religious variables in the production of pottery in articulation with the physical, biological, and cultural components in which they operate. In my mind, at least, Charlie’s manifesto set to paper the charter for the Ceramic Ecology Symposium, whose breadth of disciplinary participation I have already noted.
What Charlie and his co-founder Louana always recognized, though, was that the value of the symposia went well beyond hearing the research presented in papers to the discussion of the presented ideas afforded by the symposium’s perennial “Current Research in Ceramics” end “presentation,” and the forging of professional networks and long-lasting friendships at dinner in a nearby restaurant later in the evening. Charlie was attuned to the importance of social as well as intellectual relationships in creating this community of practice and drawing new members into its fold long before that term became popular in the academic literature. Looking back over the past thirty-five years to what may have been my first encounter with Charlie in that bar in a Denver hotel, I raise a glass in gratitude, respect, and the hope we all meet again soon.
References
Bey G.J., III, and C.A. Pool, 1992. Ceramic Production and Distribution: An Integrated Approach. Boulder: Westview Press.
Kneebone, R.R., and C.A. Pool, 1985. Archaeological Investigations of Ceramic Production: A Recent Discovery at Comoapan, Veracruz, Mexico. Paper presented at the 50th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, Denver, Colorado.
Kolb, C.C., 1973. Thin Orange Pottery at Teotihuacan. In Miscellaneous Papers in Anthropology. Occasional Papers in Anthropology 8, pp. 309-377. Pennsylvania: Department of Anthropology, The Pennsylvania State University, State College.
Kolb, C.C., 1977. Technological investigations of Mesoamerican "Thin Orange" ceramics. Current Anthropology 18:534-536
Kolb, C.C., 1986. Commercial aspects of Classic Teotihuacan Period "Thin Orange" wares. In Economic Aspects of Prehispanic Highland Mexico, edited by B. Isaac, pp. 155-205. Greenwich: Research in Economic Anthropology, Supplement 2. JAI Press.
Kolb, C.C., 1989. Ceramic Ecology in Retrospect: A Critical Review of Methodology and Results. In Ceramic Ecology 1988: Current Research on Ceramic Materials, edited by C.C. Kolb, 261-375. Oxford: British Archaeological Reports. International Series, no. 513.
Kolb, C.C., 1997. White Clay Smoking Pipes: Provenance and a Critique of ‘Pipe Stem Dating’ as a Technique Applied to a Homogeneous Collection from Barcelona, New York.” Paper presented at the 96th Annual Meeting of the American Anthropological Association, Washington, DC.
Comments
Post a Comment