The Ancient Pueblo tradition emerged around 1,200 years ago in the Four Corners region of the Southwest. Many cultures fall under the umbrella name Pueblo, including the Taos, Salado, Zuni, and Hopi people. There are five eras of the Pueblo culture, each with its own distinctive style of pottery. The Pueblo I era is noted for its smooth simplistic black on white or gray ware. As they transitioned into a more farming-focused lifestyle in the Pueblo II era, pottery became corrugated and was a more important element in cooking and trade. The Pueblo III era featured pottery that was more intentionally decorated with specific images and multiple colors. It was used both functionally in food preparation and displayed as art. The Pueblo IV era pottery was no longer corrugated, included multiple colors, and often depicted symbolic images. These pieces were fired and glazed and mass-produced as art. The final era, Pueblo V, lasts from about 400 years ago to the present day and has similar features to the previous era pottery. Modern Pueblo Native Americans still produce these forms today.

The first vessels of the Southwest region of North America were woven baskets and string bags used for transportation, storage, and other needs. This Basketmaker tradition started roughly 4,000 years ago and continued through approximately A.D. 750. While undecorated gray ware was occasionally used, it wasn't until 1,200 years ago that ceramics began to play a large role in daily life. Along with other societal changes during this time, ceramics were suddenly much more varied in shape (pitchers, ladles, bowls, jars, plates). Three distinctive regional traditions emerged: the Pueblo or Anasazi tradition, the Hohokam tradition, and the Mogollon culture. These cultures each occupied a different region of the Southwest and had distinctive cultural practices, identifying features, and pottery decoration. Archaeologists can identify these cultures through their artifacts, traditions, and links to modern day residents of this region. Many modern day Native American cultures claim links to these peoples as their ancestors and continue to practice many of the same traditions today.

Humans have always manipulated their environment, whether by acquiring food, making and using tools, or other aspects of daily life. They are constantly interacting with their environment on a daily basis. By using the available materials, humans have created shelter, made tools, created containers and vessels, and produced items of personal and cultural significance. Many of these resources are naturally occurring, such as stones, minerals, animal bones, or organic fibers from plants, while others are made from combining materials. The process of acquiring these materials and the manufacturing process can be traditional practices that are passed down from one generation to another. Because materials are unique to the location of different communities and cultures, by studying the types of materials, as well as animal remains found and the processes used to manipulate them, anthropologists and researchers can learn about the daily activities and lifestyles of the cultures they are studying. In what ways do you interact with your environment on a daily basis?

Archaeologists and researchers use the broken pieces of pottery or ceramics ("sherds") that they find during their search for and excavation of ancient settlements to learn many things about the people who once lived there. These pieces of pottery can provide clues about the age of the settlement that lies buried below the surface and the types of activities that took place there. Just by looking at the sherd, archaeologists can often recognize the size, shape, and date of the vessel based on the sherd's shape, the material used to temper the vessel, and the designs incised into or painted onto its surface. The date of the vessel will also apply to the settlement underneath the surface. Ancient societies changed the shape of their pottery vessels and their designs over time, sometimes quite rapidly, and archaeologists have been able to develop "ceramic chronologies" for different regions of the world. They do this by excavating and dating (using carbon-14 or other methods) ancient settlements of different ages and determining what the pottery of different time periods looked like.

The discipline of archaeology has changed dramatically since the time when average people were searching for strange or exotic objects. Today's archaeologists carefully excavate sites by recording the context and stratigraphic relationship of the objects they recover. Archaeologists are careful to take detailed notes during the entire process. When people continue to live in the same location for a long period of time, they build on the remains of those who lived there before, thus creating layers of remains that can be studied to learn how people lived and how they interacted with other groups. Excavation, however, is only part of the process of archaeology. Today the archaeologist may use techniques of the chemical or physical sciences to study materials used in the past and to determine where they were made and if they were brought into a site from somewhere else. Another approach is that of experimental archaeology where archaeologists attempt to recreate the objects of the past to understand the process by which the objects were made. Examples of experimental archaeology might be making tools (e.g., flintknapping) or by attempting to recreate some special type of pottery.