This paper draws upon James Scott's insights concerning the “public” and “hidden” transcripts of subjugated peoples to investigate Pueblo responses to Spanish colonization in the seventeenth century. We focus on the marked changes that occurred in the decoration of two ceramic wares produced in the Salinas Pueblo region of central New Mexico, and suggest that these changes express one aspect of native resistance to Spanish missionary efforts to eradicate Pueblo religious practices. We document that differences in the impact of missionization between the northern and southern Salinas pueblos led to marked and divergent changes in the ways women decorated glaze and white ware vessels. Women who made glaze ware bowls lived in villages under the direct control of Spanish missionaries, and appear to have deliberately simplified and masked the iconography on their vessels. Women who made white ware jars, however, lived in villages without resident Spanish missionaries. Following Spanish colonization, these women began decorating their vessels with detailed, diverse ritual iconography, apparently in an effort to reinforce, and probably to teach, religious knowledge.

This commentary questions whether the category properties of an object can be determined independent of the experience of the categorizer. Expertise studies have shown that the judged properties of an object can differ from expert to novice and from expert to expert. The expertise findings indicate that object properties exist not only in the world, but in the mind of the categorizer.

Research in expert categorization is consistent with the Schyns et al. claim that functional features are determined by constraints imposed by the learning history of the categorizer and the demands of the categorization task. However, the expertise work also suggests that a distinction should be drawn between the categorizer's perceptions of the constituent parts of the object and its functional features. Although experts and novices may parse a domain-specific object into the same parts, their featural interpretations of those parts may differ significantly.