Cross-culturally, clay cooking pots are correlated with societies situated in warm and dry climates and reliant on foods that benefit from prolonged moist cooking. Neither of these conditions, however, characterized the aboriginal coastal Arctic, where clay cooking containers were produced and used for more than 2,500 years. We explore the factors that encouraged pottery use in the Arctic and conclude that the adoption of cooking pots resulted from the interplay of social and functional factors. We propose that it was adopted (1) to meet the needs of socially constructed preferences for cooked foods and (2) to overcome specific problems associated with other cooking methods within the local social and environmental context. We demonstrate the importance of adopting an integrated perspective in the study of technology-one that considers how cultural values and social practices interact with environmental and economic factors to shape technological decisions. [

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The Arctic is poorly suited for pottery manufacture. For historic and prehistoric potters, the cool humid weather would have meant that clays were collected wet, that pots were formed and dried under humid conditions, and that the ground and fuels used during firing would be damp. These situations would have created substantial problems for potters. To investigate how these issues might have affected Thule pottery production, in 2004 the authors initiated a series of replication experiments. These experiments, informed by ethnographic accounts, were carried out in Tununak, Alaska and on the campus of the University of Nevada Las Vegas. Results of our experiments confirm the extreme difficulties associated with making pots in the Arctic. Additionally, they inform on the effects of some of the manufacturing techniques reported to have been used historically and shed light on why Arctic potters might have made the technological choices that they did.

Novel technologies linked to women and men through identitydemarcated tasks and knowledge sets can potentially have differential and even long-term effects on each group. This study follows the trajectory of two significant imports into the coastal western Alaskan system, the firearm and the metal cook pot. These imports had different implications for coastal Yup'ik women and men, young and old. Over time the gun became an integral piece of a man's tool kit and one that had the potential to boost production and thus a man's access to status-building. However, these same tools had the potential to undermine the apprenticeship system of male authority. Likewise, the metal cook pot replaced the productive oversight and skill set of elder women's ceramic production but created paths of independence for younger Yup'ik women. These changes in technology destabilized relative balances of gender and age based status, security, and authority and fashioned new gender and age based social and economic opportunities and limitations.