Associate Professor Kent Fowler will present the Department of Archaeology seminar with a talk entitled, "The Education of the Zulu Potter".

Abstract: Ethnographic research on pottery-making has urged us to think more deeply about the influence that teaching and learning has on potter’s practices and the generation of stylistic variation. However, very little work has been done on the relationship between teaching and learning as it relates to the life-history of potters. Previous work by Gosselain did show that the education of potters is not fixed once they are no longer novices, and changes while they are still actively engaged in the craft. Drawing from nearly two decades of ethnographic research on pottery making in Zulu and Swazi communities, Fowler outlines how potters learn and teach over their lifetimes and how changes in practice relate to both biological changes and shifts in social standing experienced by women as they age. Setting life-history in the broader context of economics and sources of knowledge available to potters reveals what may universally be a fundamental source of the stylistic variation so astutely observed and classified by archaeologists.

Bio: Kent D. Fowler is Associate Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Manitoba (Canada). He is a past Research Council of Canada Post-Doctoral Fellow, a Fellow of St. John’s College (Manitoba), the Royal Geographical Society and the Royal Anthropological Society, and a lifetime member of the Society of Africanist Archaeologists. His work focuses on ceramic technology and how pottery can inform our understanding of past agrarian and complex societies. Fowler’s research combines archaeological, historical, ethnographic, and archaeometry approaches to clay technologies. He has worked in Canada, Brazil, Europe, the Near East, and southern Africa. Fowler is the author of three books, over 40 journal papers and book chapters, 20 technical reports, and over 30 conference presentations, on a diverse range of projects, from ancient gardening and animal provisioning, to pottery manufacturing, artisan wellbeing, acoustics, and fingerprint analysis. He has supervised over 20 graduate and honors students, is the past recipient of the Teaching Excellence Award (Manitoba), and a current nominee for the National 3M Teaching Fellowship (Canada). Fowler currently directs the Ceramic Technology Laboratory at the University of Manitoba and the Zulu Kingdom Archaeological Project in South Africa.