ABSTRACT
The basic argument is an extension of the use of materials characterization to distinguish local from nonlocal products—an application that has a long and venerable history in American archaeology. The author presents an example in which elemental characterization discriminates between two competing hypotheses about lines of cultural inheritance among serving vessels in the southeastern Maya area. Typological studies of ceramics from the southeastern Maya area thus have embraced one hypothesis about the genealogy of Copador polychrome, while also supplying the rudiments of an alternative hypothesis. As a Salvadoran product, Copador was made by potters outside the immediate orbit of the Copán Maya elite dynasty. Thus, establishing the provenance and pedigree of Copador also tells us something about the selective pressures that may have shaped its evolutionary history. In the case of Copador, the contrasting test implications concern the patterns expected in ceramic compositional data, and the results clearly falsify the hypothesis that Copador is a Classic Maya ceramic tradition.
