Ceramic Petrography as a Service for CRM Firms and Beyond

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ceramic petrography is best known as a highly specialized skill employed by certain ceramic researchers within academic institutions. The results of this method are utilized to understand the broader culture that produced the pottery studied. However, both the technique and the holistic interpretation of the data are also used for cultural resource management projects. For the past eight years such an approach has been employed at Desert Archaeology, Inc., which builds on over 30 years of advanced petrographic analysis of pottery and sands by this company in the US Southwest. The ability to hire a specialist petrographer on a project by project basis has been beneficial to other CRM firms, non-profit research groups, and academics. This is because of the time and study required to become a proficient ceramic petrographer so that training a new person for each research program is not always feasible. The result has been analysis of ceramic material throughout the greater Southwest leading to cross-cultural perceptions of pottery production and distribution. This combines the typically academic emphasis on broad pattern identification with CRM’s greater access to material benefiting both while highlighting the importance of scientific methods within archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)   •
• Archaeological Science Outside the Ivory Tower: Perspectives from CRM

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22968