The Interamerican Diffusion of a Cooking Technique: The Culinary Shoe‐Pot 1

THIS paper explores a problem in archeological interpretation. Inferences are derived concerning the use and history of a peculiar pottery vessel shape, which are then applied to wider problems of interpretation. In archeological sites in the Southwest and in the Eastern U.S., as well as in Middle and South America, a number of pottery vessels have been found that are usually grouped together in a category called "shoe-shaped" or "birdshaped"; more rarely, they are also referred to as "duck-", "boot-", "slipper-", "moccasin-", and "foot-shaped." (In Spanish, they are usually called "botas", "patos", "patojos", "zapatillos", or "zuecos.") While some are obvious effigies of the objects from which they take their name, others bear no more resemblance to one of these objects than they do to any of the others. While studying the distribution and function of bird-effigy vessels in the Southwest (MS in preparation), I noted that some of the simpler vessel shapes cannot be surely identified as imitations of the bird form, and are therefore called "shoe-pots" by some authors. But other authors call the same shapes "bird-effigies" because there seems to be a continuous intergradation from the simple, plain, least bird-like to the most obvious bird-effigies with modeled head, wings, feet, and tail, and with painted eyes and feathers. More careful analysis, however, showed that among the simple vessels many of the larger ones have a number of features in common that the more obvious bird-effigies lack. These features include a wide, short-necked orifice and surface finish typical of cooking ware. In contrast to the other Southwestern "shoe-pots" and bird-effigies, these features are remarkably consistent in their association with each other and also show a consistent and restricted distribution in space and time. It seemed possible, then, that there is a category of pottery vessels which should be analyzed separately from the other "shoe-pots," on the grounds that they have a different use and a different history. Shortly afterward, during a visit to the Chicago Natural History Museum, I noticed displays of vessels from Nicaragua and Argentina that are identical in all visible respects to the Southwestern specimens. A check of the literature not only confirmed the widespread distribution of this particular form, but also reinforced the possibility of its independence from the other "shoe-pots" and bird-effigies. For many years, there has been speculation on the wide interamerican diffusion of the "shoe-pot" (e.g., as part of the famous "Q-Complex"-c.f. Stone 1948). But many of the vessels in this category have nothing more in common