Author Archive: Craig Cipolla
Monthly Archive: December Crai
The Past in the Present: A Dialogue
![](https://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/blog_post/thumbnail/blgo_4_image_2.jpg?itok=DcQe2CU0)
By Catherine Tammaro, Richard Zane Smith, and Craig Cipolla. Nearly a year ago we met together at the Royal Ontario Museum to discuss and handle Wendat pottery. Our meeting led to a small collaborative research and writing project that resulted in an ongoing series of blogs. So far, we’ve discussed Remembering Ancient Ceramic Traditions, Archaeological Approaches to Ceramics, and Wyandot Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics. In this entry, we bring our different perspectives into dialogue with one another to briefly explore the diversity and strength of collaborative projects such as ours. Here we focus specifically on our respective understandings of time, an important consideration for anyone interested in the past.
Wyandot Approaches to Archaeological Ceramics
![17th-century pottery fragment (photo by Catherine Tammaro) 17th-century Huron pot](https://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/blog_post/thumbnail/c1.jpg?itok=_hRLXEF0)
This blog entry is the third in a series dedicated to Remembering Ancient Ceramic Traditions, a project initiated by us when we visited the Royal Ontario Museum’s New World Archaeology Collections to view and handle pottery made by our Ancestors. You can read more on the general idea behind the project in our first post (add link) and learn about typical archaeological approaches to ceramics in our second post (add link). In this entry, we discuss and explore our specific orientations—that is, as Wyandot artists—to the archaeological ceramic collections.
Archaeological Approaches to Ceramics
![Huron pottery Huron pottery from ROM's New World Archaeology collection](https://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/blog_post/thumbnail/b2_f6.jpg?itok=gZz2zpnn)
Back in October, we posted the first in a series of blog entries dedicated to ROM curator, Craig Cipolla’s collaborative research project with Wyandot artists Richard Zane Smith and Catherine Tammaro entitled, “Remembering Ancient Pottery Traditions.” We encourage readers to look back and review the general goals of the project before diving into this post. In this entry we report on the specific ceramic collections that we viewed and discussed with Richard and Catherine, summarizing typical archaeological approaches to Huron ceramics.
Remembering Ancient Pottery Traditions
![Remembering Ancient Pottery Traditions Richard and Catherine examining ceramics made by their Ancestors.](https://www.rom.on.ca/sites/default/files/styles/medium/public/blog_post/thumbnail/8._blog1_1.jpg?itok=0b2gZRfG)
This summer Wyandot artists Richard Zane Smith and Catherine Tammaro visited the Royal Ontario Museum’s New World Archaeology collections. The purpose of their visit was to study a small sample of the ROM’s Wendat pottery collections in order to gain information on ancestral Wendat and Tionontati ceramic techniques.