Data from: 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 of community-specific deviations of morphological features of
vessels. Furthermore, this was found both in the final shape and in the
underlying process of morphogenesis; there was more variation in the
morphogenetic path among than within communities. These results suggest
that the morphological features of ceramic vessels produced by potters
reliably and nonrandomly diverge among different communities.