Mashantucket Pequot Museum and Research Center

While also tending to the needs of their children, these two Pequot women are spending the afternoon making ceramic pots, used for cooking, storing liquids, making dyes, and other tasks. Some time ago, the women gathered raw clay from a nearby riverbank, and to this they've added temper – in this case crushed shell– to help keep the pot from cracking when it's fired. You can see some on the sheet of bark at the far left.

Now the woman at the left in this scene is pinching a ball of clay into shape to serve as the base of a pot. Then she'll roll some clay into long coils, place them one on top of the next, and smooth the walls inside and out with water that she keeps inside the pot at her knees. She also smoothes the new pot with a tool you see on the flat rock: a cord-wrapped paddle.

Sometimes the decorative imprint of the cord can still be seen in the finished pot. The woman might also use other decorating tools, such as scallop shells, antlers, or toothed combs, which she presses into the moist clay. The final step in the process is firing the pots, which is done by placing them in a fire and building a mound of bark or leaves over them. After the fire dies down, the pots are hardened and ready for use.

Behind the Scenes with Archaeologist Kevin McBride

One of the most common finds at village archaeological sites is ceramics, although we're rarely lucky enough to find a whole pot. What we usually find are fragments, and sometimes if you're really lucky you'll find almost all the fragments of a complete pot, and you can piece them back together and see exactly what the pot looked like.
What's interesting to archaeologists is not so much a ceramic pot itself as the other information that it can provide. Sometimes ceramics can help us figure out when an archaeological site was occupied; in other words, when the people lived there; because there are certain forms and decorative techniques that only occur at certain time periods. Sometimes ceramics help us establish group or cultural affiliation, because each group's ceramics are distinctive. And sometimes we can tell what a pot was used for; for example, if we find remains of burned foods inside, it tells us this was a cooking pot. So that's how archaeologists in southern New England tend to use ceramics; not just to see how a pot was put together but to learn more about an archaeological site as a whole.