ABSTRACT
In 1957, a group of southwestern archaeologists met at the Pecos Conference at Gila Pueblo in Globe, Arizona, to address the growing problem with the proliferation of pottery types. At this meeting, they developed what is now known as the type-variety system for pottery analysis (Wheat et al. 1958: 34, note). The proliferation of types was due to archaeologists finding it necessary to form more precisely delimited types “in order to localize in time and space the infinitesimal variants of pottery which constitute, with other aspects of material culture, the documents of regional prehistory” (Wheat et al. 1958: 34). The authors recognized that the problem with the ever-expanding pottery typologies was not due to the number of types that could be distinguished, but with their lack of organization. Types, it was argued, are “representative of cultural phenomena” (Gifford 1960: 341); hence, the formation of types by the analyst should reflect and be guided by the complexities of the social and cultural system in which the pottery production was embedded.
