S40-6

How to Identify Cooking Pots Made by a Potter Teacher and by Apprentices: A Ceramic Ethnoarchaeological Study in Gatbuca, Calumpit, Bulacan, Philippines

University of the Philippines, Philippines

Using a potter's wheel and the paddle and anvil technique, skilled artisans make cooking pots at the pottery village of Gatbuca, Calumpit, Bulacan, Central Luzon Island, the Philippines. After being slipped with a yellow slip, the pots are next polished and burnished with an old fishnet, a small bottle, and a river pebble. The pots are then fired using thinly chopped wood and rice hay in a vacant space in the backyard. However, cooking pot making in this community is in great peril. As of 2016, five active female cooking pot makers are in the village, all in their senior years (60 years old and above). In 2015, we provided a cooking pot making training-workshop in the community, where one of the senior potters trained four local apprentices for two months. This research will demonstrate that we can identify cooking pots made by a teacher and their apprentices by comparing the metric dimensions and physical attributes of the pots they make. In this study, we randomly selected 100 pots made by the potter-teacher. We measured the aperture, diameter, and height of the cooking pots and calculated the coefficient of variation of each ceramic metrical dimension. For the apprentices, we collected all the cooking pots they made and measured, described, and compared them with the pots manufactured by their potter teacher. Also, this study identified the physical attributes of cooking pots that indicate the skill levels of the potters that created them. The archaeological implications of this paper will be discussed.