Ethnoarchaeology: Learning from Potters in Gilund

Introduction and Definition

Ethnoarchaeology is an ever-expanding subdiscipline within archaeology, and pottery undoubtedly gets more than its fair share of attention. But with recent social and economic trends, it can be seen that opportunities of undertaking certain kinds of ethnoarchaeological study are themselves diminishing. By an interesting coincidence, the village of Gilund in Rajasthan, NW India, was host to an important early third millennium BCE, Chalcolithic settlement of Ahar-Banas Complex (Sankalia et al 1969; Shinde & Possehl 2005), and at the same time to some of the last indigenous potters still working in the twenty-first century CE. The modern village of Gilund is located approximately 1.5 km from the archaeological site of Gilund, northeast of the modern village. The potters are locally called Kumhar. According to the potters and their family members, use of earthenware or ceramic vessels is no longer profitable because of modernization and the popularity of...