Cultural attraction in pottery practice: Group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities.

Pottery is a quintessential indicator of human cultural dynamics. Cultural alignment of behavioral repertoires and artifacts has been considered to rest upon two distinct dynamics: selective transmission of information and culture-specific biased transformation. In a cross-cultural field experiment, we tested whether community-specific morphological features of ceramic vessels would arise when the same unfamiliar shapes were reproduced by professional potters from three different communities who threw vessels using wheels. We analyzed the details of the underlying morphogenesis development of vessels in wheel throwing. When expert potters from three different communities of practice were instructed to faithfully reproduce common unfamiliar model shapes that were not parts of the daily repertoires, the morphometric variation in the final shape was not random; rather, different potters produced vessels with more morphometric variation among than within communities, indicating the presence of community-specific deviations of morphological features of vessels. Furthermore, this was found both in the final shape and in the underlying process of morphogenesis; there was more variation in the morphogenetic path among than within communities. These results suggest that the morphological features of ceramic vessels produced by potters reliably and nonrandomly diverge among different communities. The present study provides empirical evidence that collective alignment of morphological features of ceramic vessels can arise from the community-specific habits of fashioning clay.

Assessing the influence of culture on craft skills: A quantitative study with expert Nepalese potters.

Studies have documented that traditional motor skills (i.e. motor habits) are part of the cultural way of life that characterises each society. Yet, it is still unclear to what extent motor skills are inherited through culture. Drawing on ethnology and motor behaviour, we addressed this issue through a detailed description of traditional pottery skills. Our goal was to quantify the influence of three kinds of constraints: the transcultural constraints of wheel-throwing, the cultural constraints induced via cultural transmission, and the potters' individual constraints. Five expert Nepalese potters were invited to produce three familiar pottery types, each in five specimens. A total of 31 different fashioning hand positions were identified. Most of them (14) were cross-cultural, ten positions were cultural, five positions were individual, and two positions were unique. Statistical tests indicated that the subset of positions used by the participants in this study were distinct from those of other cultural groups. Behaviours described in terms of fashioning duration, number of gestures, and hand position repertoires size highlighted both individual and cross-cultural traits. We also analysed the time series of the successive hand positions used throughout the fashioning of each vessel. Results showed, for each pottery type, strong reproducible sequences at the individual level and a clearly higher level of variability between potters. Overall, our findings confirm the existence of a cultural transmission in craft skills but also demonstrated that the skill is not fully determined by a cultural marking. We conclude that the influence of culture on craft skills should not be overstated, even if its role is significant given the fact that it reflects the socially transmitted part of the skill. Such research offers insights into archaeological problems in providing a representative view of how cultural constraints influence the motor skills implied in artefact manufacturing.

Traditional craftspeople are not copycats: Potter idiosyncrasies in vessel morphogenesis.

Ceramics are quintessential indicators of human culture and its evolution across generations of social learners. Cultural transmission and evolution theory frequently emphasizes apprentices' need for accurate imitation (high-fidelity copying) of their mentors' actions. However, the ensuing prediction of standardized fashioning patterns within communities of practice has not been directly addressed in handicraft traditions such as pottery throwing. To fill this gap, we analysed variation in vessel morphogenesis amongst and within traditional potters from culturally different workshops producing for the same market. We demonstrate that, for each vessel type studied, individual potters reliably followed distinctive routes through morphological space towards a much-less-variable common final shape. Our results indicate that mastering the pottery handicraft does not result from accurately reproducing a particular model behaviour specific to the community's cultural tradition. We provide evidence that, at the level of the elementary clay-deforming gestures, individual learning rather than simple imitation is required for the acquisition of a complex motor skill such as throwing pottery.

How can ten fingers shape a pot? Evidence for equivalent function in culturally distinct motor skills.

Behavioural variability is likely to emerge when a particular task is performed in different cultural settings, assuming that part of human motor behaviour is influenced by culture. In analysing motor behaviour it is useful to distinguish how the action is performed from the result achieved. Does cultural environment lead to specific cultural motor skills? Are there differences between cultures both in the skills themselves and in the corresponding outcomes? Here we analyse the skill of pottery wheel-throwing in French and Indian cultural environments. Our specific goal was to examine the ability of expert potters from distinct cultural settings to reproduce a common model shape (a sphere). The operational aspects of motor performance were captured through the analysis of the hand positions used by the potters during the fashioning process. In parallel, the outcomes were captured by the geometrical characteristics of the vessels produced. As expected, results revealed a cultural influence on the operational aspects of the potters' motor skill. Yet, the marked cultural differences in hand positions used did not give rise to noticeable differences in the shapes of the vessels produced. Hence, for the simple model form studied, the culturally-specific motor traditions of the French and Indian potters gave rise to an equivalent outcome, that is shape uniformity. Further work is needed to test whether such equivalence is also observed in more complex ceramic shapes.

Attention to elders' voice in non-human primates.

The observed respect and attention to elders' speech in traditional cultures appears to have a 'universal' component which questions its possible biological bases. Animals present differential attention to the vocalizations of other individuals according to their characteristics but little is known about the potential propensity to pay more attention to vocalizations of elders. On the basis of several hundreds of vocal exchanges recorded, here we show that aged female Campbell's monkeys (Cercopithecus campbelli), despite being significantly less 'loquacious' than their younger adult counterparts, elicit many more responses when calling. These findings show that attention to elders' vocal production appears in non-human primates, leading to new lines of questioning on human culture and language evolution.