Production and Distribution of Plumbate Pottery: Evidence from a Provenance Study of the Paste and Slip Clay Used in a Famous Mesoamerican Tradeware

Previous Research on Plumbate Provenance

Before the 1930s, archaeologists suspected that Plumbate probably came from a single source, and realized that its wide distribution must indicate widespread trade in the ware (e.g., Dutton 1943). Speculation about actual sources ranged from Alta Verapaz, Guatemala (Saville cited in Dutton 1943; Seler 1915, both cited in Dutton 1943) to western El Salvador (Spinden 1915; Lothrop 1927, both cited in Dutton 1943). In the 1930s and 1940s, archaeological findings by Ed Shook (1965) and others (e.g., Dutton and Hobbs 1943; Thompson 1948) demonstrated that the region near the present border between México and Guatemala was the most likely source of Plumbate (see Figure 1). Anna O. Shepard (1948) articulated this hypothesis in her famous monograph, Plumbate: A Mesoamerican Tradeware.

Shepard’s ceramics research was innovative in its use of petrographic analysis. Her main finding in the case of Plumbate was that there are two distinct pastes, presumably corresponding to two separate sources. At the time her monograph was published, she thought that there was a perfect association of the two pastes with distinct formal categories. Effigy vessels (e.g., Figure 2), miniatures, and vessels with a distinctive style of abstract curvilinear incising, collectively known as Tohil Plumbate, were associated with one paste, while simpler serving vessels such as bowls, cylinders (Figure 3), and composite silhouette vessels, collectively known as San Juan Plumbate, were associated with a second paste. Later, unpublished correspondence (Shepard 1951, 1952) indicates that Shepard found both paste types in sherds of the simpler San Juan style in collections she examined from southwestern Guatemala.

Surveys by Shook (1965) and Phillip Drucker (1948) during the late 1940s and 1950s demonstrated that the simpler, presumed earlier style (San Juan Plumbate) was concentrated on the Pacific coastal plain of Southwestern Guatemala rather than in the highlands. Citing this evidence, Shook (1965:190) suggested that Plumbate probably originated between the Río Coatan in southern Chiapas and the Río Tilapa in Guatemala. Other archaeological projects on the coast near the México-Guatemala border (Coe 1961; Coe and Flannery 1967; Dutton 1958; Lee 1978; Lowe and Mason 1965; Lowe et al. 1982) likewise confirmed the high frequency of "San Juan Plumbate" within this region.

Identifying the region where simple Plumbate vessels in the San Juan style originated begged the question of where the fancy Tohil vessels may have originated. Indirect evidence bearing on this issue came to light in the early 1950s, when Shepard examined a collection from the La Gruta excavations at El Paraíso, near Quetzaltenango (Kidder and Shook 1959). Unpublished correspondence (Shepard 1951) indicates that both San Juan and Tohil pastes were found among sherds of the simpler San Juan style in this collection, and that some sherds had both San Juan and Tohil paste constituents. The association of the two pastes fit the hypothesis that all Plumbate came from a single source zone. And, since San Juan Plumbate appeared to come from the Pacific coastal plain, Tohil might come from that region as well. The hypothesis that Tohil was a Pacific coastal product became even more attractive when excavations at Izapa by the New World Archaeological Foundation (Figure 3) encountered whole vessel caches that contained both San Juan and Tohil-style Plumbate vessels (Lee 1973, 1978; Lowe et al. 1982).

In the early 1980s, with the encouragement and collaboration of Dr. Ronald L. Bishop, then at Brookhaven National Laboratory, I carried out the first chemical analysis of Plumbate as a dissertation project (Neff 1984; Neff and Bishop 1988). Instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) of around 400 sherds confirmed Shepard’s division of the ware into two paste classes and added a third, smaller and more geographically restricted paste class. The INAA study also confirmed Shepard’s finding that the Tohil style is confined to only one of the paste classes. As Shepard had begun to suspect by the 1950s, however, the simpler serving vessels are not compositionally uniform. In my study, simple vessels in "San Juan" style were found in all three paste compositional variants.

The INAA study also produced some new evidence consistent with Shepard and Shook’s hypothesis that Plumbate originated along the coast near the present border between México and Guatemala. Presumed pottery-making by-products from what appeared to be a waster dump in the littoral zone just east of the Río Naranjo (Figure 1) proved to be chemically quite close to the San Juan Plumbate chemical group. Although no direct evidence linking the Tohil chemical group to this region emerged, the high frequency of Tohil pastes on plain vessels, including very large bowls, within this region was most consistent with the inference of local production.

The overall picture that emerged from my study was one in which Late Classic potters at several locations within the México-Guatemala border region were employing similar techniques to make a similar range of serving vessels primarily to meet local demand. Since the widely traded Tohil style of the Early Postclassic period is associated with only one of the paste compositions, I inferred that a localized group of potters within the Plumbate production zone eventually became tied into pan-regional commercial networks. I argued that the stylistic innovations that eventually created Tohil Plumbate style were a response to the evolutionary challenge of how best to exploit the opportunities offered by non-local markets.

The big thing missing from Plumbate provenance studies undertaken up through the 1980s was analysis of raw materials. A variety of evidence, including analysis of by-products, pointed to the Guatemala-México border region as the likely source of Plumbate, but no direct linkage between the ceramics and raw material sources on the ground had yet been established. Thus, it was unclear whether Plumbate was produced all over this region or only in localized production centers, it was unclear whether San Juan and Tohil compositions derived from the same or different procurement zones, and it was unclear to what extent sources for the slip clay coincided with sources for the body clay. What was clear was that such questions needed to be answered before much could be said about the organization of Plumbate production and its circulation within the region where it was produced. Moreover, future archaeological investigation of Plumbate production facilities would be impossible without more precise information on where Plumbate was produced.

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