Transformations in Clay. Moloko pottery in its social and ritual context

The main objective of this project is to carry out an analysis of the Moloko pottery that is focused on a social understanding of the manipulation of ceramic vessels in household space. The pottery will be analysed in its contexts of production and use, p articularly within the house and around the hearth, which are key spatial foci for social and ritual discourse and change. The basic analytical building block is the spatial organization of the household, which provides the contexts within which social re lationships and relations between lived experience and material culture are negotiated, reinforced or changed. In sub-Saharan ethnography pottery stands in a special relationship to the human body and lived experience. This symbolical association, where p ots can symbolize persons, makes pottery 'something to think with', and articulates biological, technological and social changes in one simple metaphor. A theoretical perspective relating material culture to the human body, and underlining the social aspe cts of artefacts, can offer an understanding of the ceramic changes during the three settlement phases of the Moloko sequence, related to Tswana-speaking people. This project will be a part of the formal collaboration between the University of Bergen and the University of Cape Town. In addition to its archaeological component, by collating and reworking existing ceramic data from archaeologically excavated contexts, this project also has an ethnoarchaeological component, where the relationships between th e human body, gender, space, and material culture can be captured in a measurable way by a comparative ethnoarchaeological study. It will lay ground for further archaeological and anthropological research into the relations between human bodily experience , gender, physical environments, living conditions, and material culture.