Potters and motor habits: Special reference to ethnoarchaeological findings

Abstract

Reconstructing human habitual behavior, such as the making of objects in the archaeological past, is not easy. However, some efforts, albeit few, have been made to overcome this limitation and to achieve more realistic and dynamic reconstructions and understandings of habitual behavior. These efforts have many direct and indirect connections with research in the field of cognition, including the understanding of human behavior, interactions between individuals and tools or between individuals and tools and objects, and knowledge that contributes to the understanding of learning. In this paper, we discuss the archaeology of pottery-making, especially in relation to ethnoarchaeological findings, based on the perspective of cognitive archaeology, while organizing motor habit, habitual body movement, and related concepts.