Reconstructing sexual divisions of labor from fingerprints on Ancestral Puebloan pottery

Abstract

An understanding of the division of labor in different societies, and especially how it evolved in the human species, is fundamental to most analyses of social, political, and economic systems. The ability to reconstruct how labor was organized, however, especially in ancient societies that left behind few material remains, is challenged by the paucity of direct evidence demonstrating who was involved in production. This is particularly true for identifying divisions of labor along lines of age, sex, and gender, for which archaeological interpretations mostly rely upon inferences derived from modern examples with uncertain applicability to ancient societies. Drawing upon biometric studies of human fingerprints showing statistically distinct ridge breadth measurements for juveniles, males, and females, this study reports a method for collecting fingerprint impressions left on ancient material culture and using them to distinguish the sex of the artifacts’ producers. The method is applied to a sample of 985 ceramic sherds from a 1,000-y-old Ancestral Puebloan community in the US Southwest, a period characterized by the rapid emergence of a highly influential religious and political center at Chaco Canyon. The fingerprint evidence demonstrates that both males and females were significantly involved in pottery production and further suggests that the contributions of each sex varied over time and even among different social groups in the same community. The results indicate that despite long-standing assumptions that pottery production in Ancient Puebloan societies was primarily a female activity, labor was not strictly divided and instead was likely quite dynamic.

Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

“…A hanging concern with that analysis is that the authors did not consider how shrinkage may affect their results. Most recently, Kantner et al [18] also utilized the ridge density…”

The Study of Three-Dimensional Fingerprint Recognition in Cultural Heritage

“…Ancient fingerprints are always partial and have long been considered by archaeologists as physiological traits carrying poor information content, and thus, even though listed in the records, these have been neglected. In archaeology, fingerprint-based research contrasts with approaches based on ethnographic analogy and crosscultural comparisons [32]. In this sense, the latest studies based on 2-D fingerprint acquisitions represent already a major contribution to the field [16,17,32].…”

“…In archaeology, fingerprint-based research contrasts with approaches based on ethnographic analogy and crosscultural comparisons [32]. In this sense, the latest studies based on 2-D fingerprint acquisitions represent already a major contribution to the field [16,17,32].…”

“…Interestingly, the inference of demographic data (biological sex, age) from fingerprint patterns is investigated as to provide more nuanced understandings about the role of juveniles/adults and men/women in the making process of such artifacts in the past societies [16,17,32,34]. We refer to "ancient fingerprints" as the threedimensional (3-D) impressions left on items by past producers; ancient fingerprints are molds in reverse of the actual prints.…”

Who painted that? The authorship of Schematic rock art at the Los Machos rockshelter in southern Iberia

“…Palaeodermatoglyphs are fingerprints found in archaeological contexts. These ancient impressions may be left accidentally or voluntarily by their author, and are found on a variety of materials, including on fired clay surfaces such as that of the Upper Palaeolithic Venus of Dolní Vestonice in Moravia (Czechia; Králík & Novotný 2003) and on pottery sherds such as from Bronze Age Catalonia or among the Pueblo people of the American Southwest (Míguez et al 2016;Kantner et al 2019). Ancient fingerprints, however, tend to be partial, and it is often impossible to identify the specific area of the finger used to make the print (Králík & Novotný 2003;Králík & Nejman 2007;Míguez et al 2016).…”