| Research Abstract |
Earthen pottery was made on most of high islands in Oceania except for the remort islands in Polynesia. The variation existed among different pottery traditions seems to be related to different function of pots and different natural environments to which technology was adapted to. Adaptive transformation of ceramic technology is most likely to take place when new environmental conditions are encountered. In the case of colonization, rapid change can be expected until a state of "adaptedness" is achieved, at which point the rate of adaptation will taper off. One should therefore be careful in comparing a certain type of pottery in one pottery tradition with a type in a different pottery tradition, particularly if these were made under different environmental conditions. Even if both pottery traditions had been derived froiti a single tradition originally., technology and products could well be adapted differently to different environmental conditions. If, therefore, one is to look at cultural relationships between two pottery traditions, the original technology should be compared but not the modified technology.
There are clearly numerous potential ways that people could adapt their ceramic technology to solve a problem created by unusual environmental conditions. It might be expected that the general course of changes would result in adaptations which use less energy to achieve the same result. It is obvious that kinds and degrees of cultural demands for pottery in a society impact significantly on selecting the course of ceramic changes. A combination of the natural and the cultural environments vary from society to society which produces a ceramic tradition. Hence ceramic attributes of an assemblage should bfc examined as a whole in relation to their environments before they are compared with those of other ceramic assemblages.
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