Florida is peppered with broken pottery, vestiges of a time when Indigenous people throughout the peninsula molded clay into cooking ware and earthen vessels. Archaeologist Ann Cordell has spent her entire career studying this material, from the oldest pottery made in North America 4,500 years ago to vessels made by Indigenous people during the colonial era a few short centuries ago. She conducted her research while managing the ceramic technology lab at the Florida Museum of Natural History for nearly four decades, and she continues to donate her time as a volunteer following her retirement in 2017.

Cordell’s contributions were officially acknowledged this month when she was bestowed a lifetime achievement award from the Southeastern Archaeological Conference. She is only the second archaeologist who is not a tenured faculty member to receive the distinction in the 21-year history of the award. With this honor, she joins retired Florida Museum curators Jerald Milanich, Kathleen Deagan and William Marquardt, who were recipients of the lifetime achievement award in 2015 and 2016.

“I was one of 17 people who nominated her, and it boils down to two things,” said Neill Wallis, curator of Florida archaeology and bioarchaeology at the Florida Museum. “One is her scientific contributions. She set the bar on how to do petrographic analysis on pottery, and for decades, she used exacting and meticulous methods that others weren’t. She’s also a force in training and collaborating with colleagues. She’s always going out of her way to help people with their research.”

Cordell completed a bachelor’s degree in anthropology in 1976 and a master’s in anthropology in 1983, both at the University of Florida. In 1979, she accepted a managerial position for the ceramic technology lab at the Florida Museum, which had begun operations two years earlier under the leadership of Cordell’s mentor, Prudence Rice. Cordell held the position for the next 38 years, through all the vicissitudes of a long and productive career. Her accomplishments during that time firmly established her reputation as a premier expert on Florida pottery and a coveted authority on ceramics from surrounding areas.

Cordell obtained her bachelors’ and master’s degrees from the University of Florida and joined the ceramic technology lab two years after it was established by her mentor, Prudence Rice.

Prudence Rice worked as a teaching faculty member in the UF anthropology department in the 1970s and started the Ceramic Technology Lab at the Florida Museum.

“Ann was one of my first [master’s] students when I taught at the University of Florida,” Prudence Rice wrote in her nomination letter. “Her colleagues throughout the Southeastern U.S. and Caribbean regularly seek her expertise and have asked her to study pottery from Cuba, Puerto Rico, Dominica and as far away as Ecuador.”

Cordell’s magic lies in her ability to take what would appear to most other people as a mere hardened lump of clay and systematically interrogate it until it reveals where it was made and what it had been used for. In a broader context, archaeologists can also use pottery to track the historical movement and distribution of people and infer some of the interactions that took place between them.

Foremost in Cordell’s research, however, is the determination of what material was used to make different types of pottery. To do this well, she obtained a second bachelor’s degree in 1993, this time with a major in geology. Cordell took the methods geologists use to identify minerals in rocks, called petrography, and applied them to archaeology with great success.

Most of her work involved staring down the ocular tube of a petrographic microscope to classify individual mineral grains. By doing so, she can say whether the pottery was sourced locally or traded widely. Her work also resolved an enduring problem that plagued archaeologists who, up to that point, had primarily classified pottery types based on the markings incised or impressed onto their surfaces.

In his nomination letter, Florida Museum curator emeritus Jerald Milanich recounted the effect Ann’s early use of petrography had on the archaeological community.

“When I was an archaeological student…in the late 1960s and early 1970s, we used to sort all those potsherds into piles: decorated of one kind were in one stack; those of another in a second, and still others in a third. Worse, there were all those pesky undecorated sherds. Then Ann Cordell came along armed with ceramic technology (then still a developing approach) and we all learned that our methods of analyzing and sorting potsherds based on what things looked like on a particular day were not very accurate.”

Archaeologists take raw clay samples from areas where pottery has been discovered. Using this material, they mold rectangular clay blocks, which they dice into briquettes. Each briquette is heated at different temperatures, and archaeologists analyze the corresponding change in color.

Much of Cordell’s work consisted of long hours looking at pottery through a microscope to identify its constituent material.

This 1 mm section of pottery viewed under a microscope has a variety of materials embedded in its matrix. Tiny freshwater sponge fragments were used in the temper for this vessel, evident from the multiple spicules that appear as round, white dots in cross section.

A glancing examination of pottery can reveal a wealth of information to the trained eye. This fragment, for example, has fish scales embedded in its matrix, meaning it was likely made near an area where food was prepared.

Cordell was one of three people given the lifetime achievement award this year, and she is one of four researchers from the Florida Museum of Natural History who have received the distinction.

Cordell has studied pottery from multiple places and time-periods, but she has a special fascination for the Weeden Island culture. The name stems from a phonetically identical archaeological site on Weedon Island in Tampa Bay, but the Weeden Island culture was broadly distributed throughout Central and North Florida, along with parts of Georgia and Alabama. She wrote her master’s thesis and her first peer-reviewed publication — published in the Proceedings of the Southeast Archaeological Conference Bulletin — on pottery from a Weeden Island site in North Florida. She periodically returned to the subject several times during her career, culminating in a chapter in her own edited book in 2021.

“That research has illuminated pre-Columbian social and political organization, religious beliefs, the role of elites within society and other research topics. Her work continues to be a major influence on how we understand the past,” Milanich wrote.

Without a Ph.D., Cordell could not officially advise students or serve on graduate student committees. Her job overseeing the ceramic technology lab required only that she maintain the collection and conduct research. Yet, though she never matriculated a single student, Cordell was a mentor to multiple generations of aspiring and established archaeologists alike.

“The number of scholars she trained, aided and collaborated with over the past 40+ years…is like a who’s who of Southeastern Archaeology and beyond,” wrote Donna Ruhl, a retired archaeobotanist with the Florida Museum.

Lindsay Bloch, who succeeded Cordell as ceramic technology lab manager when she retired in 2017, echoed this sentiment in her nomination letter. “Ask Ann to take a look,” she wrote. “For over 40 years, that has been the common refrain. It’s not just what she knows, but her tremendous generosity in sharing it that makes her an exemplary archaeologist.”

Sources: Ann Cordell, cordell@flmnh.ufl.edu;
Neill Wallis, nwallis@flmnh.ufl.edu

Media contact: Jerald Pinson, jpinson@floridamuseum.ufl.edu, 352-294-0452