Research on the sexual division of labor among adults has exam
ined its relationship to sexual dimorphism, labor-economizing
strategies in production processes, and cultural complexity. The
author argues that none of the studies has successfully explained
the sexual allocation of labor in some of the crafts because re
searchers have not examined the causal effect of the material and
social conditions thatgive rise to household-level variation in access
to subsistence resources. The author derives a theory from the work
of ethnographers George Foster and Dean Arnold, introduces two
codes for the Standard Cross-Cultural Sample, and tests the hy
pothesis using logistic regression. The results indicate that the
potters tend to be exclusively or primarily women in societies with
relatively easy access to subsistence resources. Men tend to be the
equal or principle potters in those societies where the potters'nuclear
families have limited access to subsistence resources and instead
rely on the exchange of manufactured pottery.
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