It seems to have become the custom for the author of a paper on archaeological methodology to provide his readers with a review of the theoretical trends of the discipline. The general outline of these trends must by now be the common property of all literate anthropologists. do not consider it improper, therefore, to refrain from repeating a summary of them here. Much more important to this study of the nature of archaeological inference is a statement of the present aims of the discipline and the role which inference is expected to play in achieving these aims.

Phillips and Willey (1953: 616) succinctly describe the proper ends of archaeological research:

The ultimate objective of archeology is the creation of an image of life within the limits of the residue that is available from the past. The procedural objectives toward such a goal may be dichotomized into reconstructions of space-time relationships, on the one hand, and contextual relationships on the other.

This study is an analysis of inference as the product of archaeological subject matter. So far very little has been said about the data of archaeology except that they belong to the context of culture. According to Osgood's (1940) system for ordering data within this context, they are classified as material percepta and considered under the heading of techniculture. But this is a heading which covers all of the objects made and used by the “aggregate of human beings.” Even on the limited level of archaeology this means a tremendous coverage, far greater than is necessary for a case study. For practical purposes, therefore, some criteria of relevance are needed to define a small unit of techniculture which is appropriate for illustrating the nature of archaeological inference.

The design for the present experiment calls for 2 different presentations of the fairly large number of vessels which have been collected from the Yucatecan Maya over the past 75 years. First, the vessels are separated from their ethnographic context in order to create a hypothetical archaeological situation. The collection is described in terms of its new context, that is, according to a standard archaeological procedure. The description then constitutes the material percepta of an archaeological pottery techniculture. These percepta are examined for suggestions as to what the related social or behavioral percepta might be, and the indicated inferences are made whenever they seem both plausible and probable. Then the vessels are returned to their original context and presented as a unit according to an accepted ethnographic method. (Compare Kroeber and Harner 1955; H. S. Colton 1956.)

This presentation of the material percepta is intended to be no more than the starting point for an exercise in inferential method. It is therefore somewhat different from the description found in the usual archaeological report. Ordinarily the archaeologist can enrich his presentation of the descriptive data or material percepta by including some of the inferential findings which these data make possible. Assigning the name of “cooking pot” to a vessel type is a common example. But the present study is an analysis of these very inferences. The resemblance between it and the usual archaeological description must stop just short of these inferential increments. In describing the modes and types which follow I try to avoid the use of words and phrases which might prejudice the outcome of the experiment.

The 51 inferences which are set forth on the following pages constitute an exercise in archaeological method. These inferences are not offered as a series of probable statements of the pottery techniculture, but as examples of how such statements may be achieved.

Name: kat, potter's clay. There are a number of Maya words meaning clay, but all sources agree that kat is the specific term for the kind of clay used for pottery making. Both the Motel and Vienna dictionaries define kat as the day used by the olleros or pot makers. E. H. Thompson, writing about 1900 (and probably overstating the situation) claims that all potter's clay was further subdivided into 2 classes: xahkat (zac-kat, white/clay) and xkatkan (kart Icot, yellow/clay). Gaumer gives kan kan kat (yellow/clay) for the sample he collected in 1895 at Izamal. My Mama informants, like those from the other villages, always refer to their clay as kat. However, they do differentiate between the zahkat which they ordinarily use and the equally good but much less used kankat. I did not find this distinction at any other village.