Estudio etnoarqueológico de la alfarería tradicional extremeña

Abstract

This analysis has focused on the knowledge of the traditional pottery made in the region of Extremadura through the personal testimony of their creators, the craftsmen. 21 workshops have shown us how was their work until the moment in which their meaning was under question. After this, they came to an end or hardly evolved with many difficulties. This survey is a sample of a craft and industrial sector, which was a wider one in the middle of the 20th century, but also decreasing slowly until it became a rural culture. Nevertheless, we think it is the survival of an old wide culture that come from the 'Antiguo Régimen' (the Ancien Régime). Such industrial sector had almost disappeared when this research was made, between 1987 and 1992. The research, however, was focused on recording the traditional features that were either still practiced or remembered. Even if this research can be considered as an ethnographical work, an archaeological focus have been kept by paying attention to the material record, both the architecture and the products (tools and pieces). This approach has been a priority for us that allow us to propose the ethno-archaeology as an useful methodology to establish, if possible, analogies with other historical periods: when a cultural element can be shown along the history, in the society, in the same space, in the same ancestral, familiars and inherited crafts, the evidence belongs to a superior sphere. We will offer the last step of a centurial path that it has come to its end.