Pottery points to 'mother culture'.More than 3,000 years ago, a coastal town served as the center of a "mother culture" that shaped societies in a wide swath of what's now southern and central Mexico Mexico, city, Mexico Mexico or Mexico City, Span. Ciudad de México (Méjico), city (1990 pop. 8,236,960; 1991 met. area est. 20,899,000), central Mexico, capital and largest city of Mexico. . Jeffrey P. Blomster of George Washington University George Washington University, at Washington, D.C.; coeducational; chartered 1821 as Columbian College (one of the first nonsectarian colleges), opened 1822, became a university in 1873, renamed 1904. in Washington, D.C., and his colleagues arrived at this conclusion following an extensive investigation into the region's pottery pottery, the baked-clay wares of the entire ceramics field. For a description of the nature of the material, see clay. Types of Pottery It usually falls into three main classes—porous-bodied pottery, stoneware, and porcelain. trade. Blomster's team determined the chemical composition of 725 ceramic This article is about ceramic materials. For the fine art, see Ceramic art. The word ceramic is derived from the Greek word κεραμικός (keramikos). pieces and 828 clay samples, from the town of San Lorenzo San Lorenzo, town, S Honduras, on the Gulf of Fonseca. Its satellite, Henecán is the chief Pacific port of Honduras. Henecán's modern port facilities and deepwater harbor and channel approach were constructed in the late 1970s after the old port at and six other ancient population centers. The pieces were between 2,850 and 3,450 years old. Using the data from their analyses, the researchers traced the movement of pottery goods and found that communities everywhere imported pottery that originated in San Lorenzo--defined by the cultural style called Olmec--but that San Lorenzo didn't import any ceramic goods in return. Potters at some sites outside San Lorenzo also created imitations of Olmec jars from local clays, the researchers report in the Feb. 18 Science. The new results challenge the view that Olmec-era societies in Mexico traded goods back and forth as "sister cultures," contributing about equally to the spread of pottery-making techniques and symbolic designs.--B.B. |
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