Renowned as a cookware and deeply rooted in an Indian past, black-on-red glazed pottery has been produced in the barrios of Puebla, Mexico, for over 450 years. Flora S. Kaplan draws on several disciplines and techniques to describe, classify, and interpret style in this Mexican folk pottery tradition.

The concept of style - although widely used in archaeology, ethnology, and art history - often is too vague to be useful in developing either an empirical methodology for its study or in illuminating the creative and cognitive processes in human beings. Kaplan, however, defines style rigorously in her study of a single functioning style of utilitarian folk pottery and seeks to explicate the conditions in which creative and cognitive processes take place.

In her search for meaning in group style as well as for a replicable methodology for the systematic analysis and comparative study of style in material culture, Kaplan turns to the techniques of ethnology, archaeology, and linguistics, thus providing a basis for a testable model.

Throughout this ethnographic and ethnohistoric description of black-on-red cooking ware, Kaplan tests and supports two notions of style: that style conveys the ideas and feelings of a group and that it "is not the by-product of technique and an innate creative impulse but a system that is held in the mind and shared and transferred through learning and interaction through time and space." Her statistical analyses - including cluster analysis and nonmetric multidimensional scaling - support the concept of style as a system.