ceramic-making at present
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pendent decades, the enlightenment reforms of the nineteenth century, and the regime of Porfirio DĂaz in which technological progress was accompanied by increasing marginalization of the countryside and exploitation of urban workers. We also do not know how the ceramic technology was during the first decades after the revolution of 1910. The information gap ended in the 1950s when the first anthropological studies of contemporary ceramics in central Mexico appeared (DĂaz 1966; Foster 1959, 1967; RendĂłn 1950). These publications documented the situation of pottery towns at that time, considering aspects such as the process and organization of production. Those early scholars gave special attention to the methods of manufacture, vessel forms and decorations with pre-Hispanic antecedents. Thus, they presented ceramic-making as a static and conservative occupation, closely attached to ancient forms of social organization. After these initial studies, in the 1970s and 1980s more scholars investigated contemporary ceramics (e.g., Engelbrecht 1987; Katz 1977; Lackey 1981; Papousek 1981). They recognized that ceramic-making was changing and that some aspects registered in earlier studies were at that time not present. These researchers also observed that potters were not as conservative as their predecessors believed. Today this craft continues to change, and many aspects documented by Foster, and even by scholars of the 1980s, have also been modified. This is evidently related to the important changes that Mexican society experienced in the last fifty years. Mexico has been transformed since the 1960s. There has been an extraordinary population growth, and the migration from rural areas to urban centers and the United States has notably increased, so that social organization and culture of towns is now being completely reshaped. There has also been a general modernization trend in society and government. For example, the school education has been generalized, the health system has been improved and made accessible to more people, road and communication infrastructure has been notably extended, and access to international information and markets is now possible for more people. All this has had effects on the ancient community and its material culture. In some places the community, as a form of organization, is practically disappearing as towns are being incorporated into the cities, and the urban culture has been extended. In other places, the community has been preserved but mainly because it has not been integrated into the new social welfare. Still, in other towns parts of the ancient organization and habits have