Endnote 9 – Pottery Talks

Note that the fact that the servant (called na’ar– boy) prepared the meat does not obscure the gendered dichotomy as adolescent boys sometimes fall outside the male category and can engage in female work (Anne S. Yentsch, “The Symbolic Divisions of Pottery: Sex-Related Attributes of English and Anglo-American household Pots,” in R.H. McGuire and R. Paynter, eds., The Archaeology of Inequality [Oxford: Blackwell, 1991], p. 341; Mary Braithwaite, “Decoration as Ritual Symbol: A Theoretical Proposal and an Ethnographic Study in Southern Sudan,” in Ian Hodder, ed., Symbolic and Structural Archaeology [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1982], p. 85). Servants are, in many cases, perceived as children, and this is the case here, as implied by the term na’ar.