cultural attraction in pottery practice: group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities

Pottery is a quintessential indicator of human cultural dynamics. Cultural alignment of behavioral repertoires and artifacts has been considered to rest upon two distinct dynamics: selective transmission of information and culture-specific biased transformation. In a cross-cultural field experiment, we tested whether community-specific morphological features of ceramic vessels would arise when the same unfamiliar shapes were reproduced by professional potters from three different communities who threw vessels using wheels. We analyzed the details of the underlying morphogenesis development of vessels in wheel throwing. When expert potters from three different communities of practice were instructed to faithfully reproduce common unfamiliar model shapes that were not parts of the daily repertoires, the morphometric variation in the final shape was not random; rather, different potters produced vessels with more morphometric variation among than within communities, indicating the presence..., Potters from three communities were instructed to faithfully reproduce four different model shapes with the thinnest walls possible using two different quantities of clay (0.75 kg or 2.25 kg), giving a total of eight experimental conditions. The four shapes (referred to as Cylinder, Bowl, Sphere, and Vase, respectively) were presented as pictures without providing any indication of the absolute dimensions to be produced. The four shapes were not part of any of the potters’ daily repertoire. Potters produced five specimens for each of the eight vessel types. The experimental sessions were video-recorded under standardized conditions using a Panasonic NV-GS320 camcorder. The camera was fixed on a tripod with lens orientation centered on the vertical rotation axis of the wheel. The camera was positioned at a height of 30 cm above the level of the wheel at a horizontal distance of 4-6 m. The lower edge of the video scene was aligned with the center of the wheel. The zoom was adapted to full..., , # Data from: cultural attraction in pottery practice: group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities

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Experimental data used in \"Cultural attraction in pottery practice: group-specific shape transformations by potters from three communities\".

Methodological Information: see the manuscript methods section or the methods section of the Dryad dataset (DOI:10.5061/dryad.9ghx3ffpv) for details. Briefly, the dataset contains the two-dimensional outlines of the clay form as a function of time extracted from the video recordings of a cross-cultural experiment with 21 potters from three different cultural backgrounds (French and two Indian communities--Prajapati and Multani Kumhar).

## Description of the Data and file structure

## Summary Metrics

* File count: 1
* Total file size: 713 MB
* File formats: .mat

## Table of Contents

* Pottery_Morphogenesis_Data.mat

## Setup

* Unpacking instructions: n/a
* Recommended software/tools: Matlab version 202...