3. The Method of Procedure

Extract

The design for the present experiment calls for 2 different presentations of the fairly large number of vessels which have been collected from the Yucatecan Maya over the past 75 years. First, the vessels are separated from their ethnographic context in order to create a hypothetical archaeological situation. The collection is described in terms of its new context, that is, according to a standard archaeological procedure. The description then constitutes the material percepta of an archaeological pottery techniculture. These percepta are examined for suggestions as to what the related social or behavioral percepta might be, and the indicated inferences are made whenever they seem both plausible and probable. Then the vessels are returned to their original context and presented as a unit according to an accepted ethnographic method. (Compare Kroeber and Harner 1955; H. S. Colton 1956.)