Chapter 15 Ceramic Vessel Compositions and Styles as Evidence of the Local and Nonlocal Social Affiliations of Ritual Participants at the Mann Site, Indiana Bret J. Ruby and Christine M. Shriner Hopewellian interactions encompassed a vast geographic range and engaged a socially and linguistically diverse set of participants. These interactions are evidenced by the pan-Eastern Woodlands distributions of specific raw materi- als, artifacts, and styles between about a.d. 1 and a.d. 400 (Seeman 1979a). Increasingly, recent research is challenging and refining the notion of a monolithic and undifferentiated “Hopewell Interaction Sphere” (Caldwell 1964; Struever and Houart 1972) to account for these interre- gional distributions. Detailed distributional stud- ies and chemical analyses are adding richness, depth, and detail to our understanding of the spatial distributions and social contexts of var- ious styles, raw materials, and finished goods. Increasingly, there is evidence that Hopewellian interactions differed in geographic scale, direc- tion, duration, intensity, and nature. A more complex and disparate set of social relation- ships, motivations, and mechanisms is neces- sary to account for the documented variabil- ity in the distribution of Hopewellian items and ideas. Research contributing to this more detailed understanding of Hopewellian interactions began with Seeman’s (1979a, 1995) comprehensive dis- tributional studies of finished artifacts and raw materials. Also seminal have been more focused chemical analyses aimed at tracing the source and movement of particular raw materials in- cluding copper, flint clay, galena, meteoric iron, and obsidian (Carr and Sears 1985; Goad 1979; Griffin 1965; Griffin et al. 1969; Hatch et al. 1990; Hughes 1992; Hughes et al. 1998; Prufer 1961b, 1962; Walthall et al. 1979). In addition, researchers have long used the stylistic informa- tion encoded in ceramic decoration as a means of monitoring Hopewellian interactions (e.g., Braun 1985, 1991; Griffin 1952a; Loy 1968; Prufer 1968; Snow 1998; Snow and Stephen- son 1998; Toth 1988). Recently, researchers have begun to integrate mineralogical and chemi- cal characterization of ceramic composition in these studies. These compositional data can be used to identify and discriminate between po- tential production loci (J. A. Brown and Stolt- man 1992; Carr 1992b; Carr and Komorowski 553