Archaeometry & Materials Analysis: Ceramic Petrography (Other Keyword)
51-75 (89 Records)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2021: General Sessions" session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. A petrographic analysis was conducted on sherd samples from the small prehistoric Maya site of Hun Tun, located in the hinterlands of the larger elite polity, La Milpa, in Northwestern Belize. Hun Tun contains a chultun, an archaeological feature in the ground which was filled with a clay which was lacking in inclusions. Dr. Robyn Dodge, the archaeologist who...
Petrographic Analysis of Ceramics from Umbro Greek, Southern Calabria, Italy (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Here we present the first results of petrographic analysis on ceramic sherds from Umbro Greek archaeological site, a Classical period farmhouse in Southern Calabria, Italy, dating from the 5th to 4th centuries BCE. The site is located on the Umbro plateau, halfway between the Ionian Sea and the Aspromonte Massif, an area extensively researched by the Bova...
Petrographic Analysis of CPAS Ceramics: Long-Term Continuity and Change in Chengdu Plain Pottery Production (2023)
This is an abstract from the "The Chengdu Plain Archaeology Survey (2004–2011): Highlights from the Final Report" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Although ceramic analysis is sure to be a critical line of evidence for understanding the development of complex society in the Chengdu Plain (Sichuan province, China), only a small number of technical studies have been carried out on pottery from the region. Ceramic sherds collected by the Chengdu Plain...
Petrographic Analysis of Pre-Columbian Pottery From Nevis, Eastern Caribbean (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Prehistoric Amerindians in the Eastern Caribbean often used local materials in the manufacturing of ceramics, and in some cases, transported these as they migrated. Given the ubiquity of ceramics in the Caribbean, they are useful in discerning past movements, and spheres of interaction. However, studies of this nature are scarce...
Petrographic and Chemical Analysis of Ceramics of the Atlantic Period of Baol (1400–1900), Historical Kingdom of Northern Senegambia (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The petrographic and chemical analysis of ceramic shards from the Senegalese Atlantic period (1400-1900) is the weak link in archaeological research in Senegal. Archaeological surveys and excavations carried out for my doctoral thesis yielded several artifacts, including local ceramics. A qualitative study of the ceramics collection was carried out...
Petrographic and Lead-Isotope Analysis of Pottery from Goat Spring Pueblo, New Mexico (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Research at Goat Spring Pueblo, a village located in the Rio Abajo region of south-central New Mexico, examines cultural continuity and transformation in the late Ancestral Pueblo period (AD 1300–1680). This poster reports data concerning local versus nonlocal pottery production and vessel exchange at...
Petrographic and Technological Analysis of Ancient Polychrome Ceramics from Upper Madeira River, Amazonia (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Several researchers have been showing that the southwestern Amazon is a center of cultural innovation and diversity in lowlands South America. Archaeological studies carried out in the last decades have also revealed that the region has ancient centers of ceramic production. At the upper Madeira River, southwest Amazonia,...
Petrographic Perspectives on Ceramic Technology and Provenance in Northern Botswana (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Over the last 45 years, Wilmsen, James Denbow, and others have recovered ceramics from nearly thirty excavated sites, in the northern half of Botswana. Together with Phenyo Thebe and Ann Griffiths, Wilmsen has also sampled clays and sands throughout the region, has obtained samples of raw materials, and prepared pastes and pots...
Petrographic Perspectives on the Ceramic Complexity in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin (2018)
Archaeologically known ceramic pastes from the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, Mexico, involved long-lived paste recipes that have been identified both visually and via neutron activation. This paper focuses upon Late Postclassic Tarascan state-period ceramics (AD 1350-1525) and contextualizes new petrographic data within the regional geology and prior research in order to assess aspects of the longevity and complexity in potter’s paste choices within the basin.
Petrography, Production, and Provenance of Ceramics from La Blanca, Guatemala (2018)
The Middle Preclassic (900-600 BCE) was a critical time of political and social centralization in the Guatemalan lowlands. Of particular interest is La Blanca, one of the first polities to rise and show signs of regional influence and potential urbanization. To reconstruct everyday life I am using excavated ceramic refuse to observe dynamics surrounding three households. This, in turn, elucidates elements of La Blanca’s political economy associated with the manufacturing and production of...
Pots with Purpose: Examining Mortuary Craft Specialization on the Late Woodland Gulf Coast (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Extant models of craft specialization often assume that craft production served to instantiate or reify existing social relationships. By this line of reasoning, pots must have played only a passive role at communal gatherings and mortuary rituals. If pots were merely the accoutrements of specialists, the symbols of lineages, or...
Pottery Production at Idalion, Cyprus: Investigating First Millennium BCE Politics and Culture through Ceramic Petrography. (2018)
On the island of Cyprus, the first millennium BCE was a period of change in politics and culture brought about by new people, new governance, and new technology. This paper attempts to analyze these changes using one site. Idalion is located in the east-central part of the island. The polity went through many changes from its founding, c. 1200 BCE, through the first millennium BCE and I have begun to investigate some through petrographic analysis of pottery. Pottery production can represent...
Pottery Traditions in the Hyperarid Core of the Atacama Desert: Petrography and Geochemistry of Iluga Túmulos Ceramics (Tarapacá, Northern Chile) (2021)
This is an abstract from the "Scaling Potting Networks: Recent Contributions from Ceramic Petrography " session, at the 86th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. The Iluga Túmulos site (900 BC–AD 1600) is an archaeological area of great significance, with abandoned agricultural and public structures partially buried by aridization processes. It represents a record of multiple cultural occupations, which started in the Early Formative and continued until Inca and Spanish...
Potting Communities on a Purépecha Landscape, Angamuco, Michoacán, Mexico (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Documentation of the chaîne opératoire allows us to investigate the manufacturing steps that transform raw materials into finished products. Study of these steps can facilitate discussions about the intentions of ancient potters and potter communities of practice. In western Mesoamerica during the Late...
Preliminary Results of Petrographic and Chemical Analyses of Lapita Pottery Assemblage Excavated from Kurin Site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia (2019)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. In this paper, we will illustrate the number of possible pottery-making locations that we have identified so far from the Lapita pottery assemblage excavated at Kurin site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia. We first examined the non-plastic inclusions to determine whether minerals and rock fragments identified through a petrographic microscope may...
Provenance Analysis of Tempering Materials using Quantitative Petrography in the Formative Basin of Mexico (2019)
This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramics sourcing studies in the Basin of Mexico suffer from the interior drainage problem. Sediment erodes from the mountains and mixes as it drains inward toward the lake at the center. Material composition, and the ceramics made from them, grades subtly over space as a result, making provenance analysis difficult. In a prior...
Ramey on the Frontier: A Pilot Study of Select Ramey Incised Technology from Cahokia’s Southern Neighbors (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Step by Step: Tracing World Potting Traditions through Ceramic Petrography" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Cahokia’s influence on the archaeological cultures of the upper Central Mississippi River Valley (CMRV) has often been described as less prominent than processes taking place in the northern hinterlands. Although few examples are found at each site, Ramey Incised jars are found in many early and middle...
Recent Geochemical Analysis of Ceramics from the Upper Basin Region of the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument (2024)
This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. This poster presents the results of recent geochemical analysis of ceramics and other clay artifacts in the Upper Basin Region of the Baaj Nwaavjo I'tah Kukveni Grand Canyon National Monument. We will compare the geochemical composition of Tusayan Grayware and San Francisco Mountain Grayware sherds, acquired by portable x-ray fluorescence (pXRF), to the...
Recipe for Daub? A Comparative Petrographic Study of a Common Construction Component in the Maya Area (2018)
Daub is characterized as a mixture of a plastic substance, like natural clay or plaster, and an organic, fibrous binder, which is applied and smoothed against a stick or wood structure to construct a wall. This building strategy is used extensively throughout the world, past and present, yet studies have tended to focus exclusively on identification of component ingredients, rather than compositional and provenance characteristics that offer insights related to resource procurement patterns,...
The Recipes of Disaster in Northern Iroquoia: Integrating Digital Image Analysis into Petrographic Practice (2018)
European contact with Northern Iroquoian communities brought about a series of direct and indirect consequences. These involved European-disease epidemics and a series of migrations that moved people across the landscape as refugees, captives, or conquerors. Ceramic petrography offers a way for archaeologists to understand the impacts such demographic upheavals can have on technological systems. Iroquoian potters often use a recurrent set of rock and sand types that homogenize the paste-type...
Reconstructing Ancient Pottery Transfer Patterns through Petrographic Analysis: A Case Study of New Caledonian Lapita Pottery Assemblages (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Archaeological Science and African Archaeology: Appreciating the Impact of David Killick" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Humans first arrived in New Caledonia during the Lapita seaborne expansion from New Guinea to Tonga between 1250 and 800 cal BC. We use stylistic and petrographic analyses of Lapita pottery to study social relationships among Lapita communities. New Caledonia has a large island (Grande Terre) with...
Reconstructing Technological Traditions and Interaction in the Precolonial Middle Orinoco: Ceramics in Mono- and Multiethnic Communities in the Amazon Basin (AD 1000–1500) (2023)
This is an abstract from the "Andean and Amazonian Ceramics: Advances in Technological Studies" session, at the 88th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. Ceramic analyzes in precolonial archaeological sites in the Orinoco followed cultural history and ecological and evolutionary frameworks. However, the co-occurrence of different ceramic styles within common periods in multicomponent sites was not fully addressed, sometimes assuming it was the result of trade or from...
Resources, Technological Traditions, and Social Networks: A Study of Late Neolithic Cooking Vessels in the Lake Taihu Region (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Resources and Society in Ancient China" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. During the Songze cultural period, there were two distinct technological pathways for the production of pottery cooking vessels, including Ding (tripod) and Yan (steamer), used in the vicinity of Lake Taihu. In areas like southern Jiangsu, Shanghai, and Jiaxing, plant debris was commonly mixed with clay to create fiber-tempered vessels. In...
Rethinking Migration and Mobility in the Late Roman West with Ceramic Petrography (2018)
For some time the study of migration with ceramics was considered unreliable or unuseful after the ethnic discourse applied by cultural historians. The idea of 'pots=people' was heavily criticized, and rightly so: for similarities in style can result from mobility in people, goods and ideas. Yet, discarding the ceramic evidence altogether is not the solution. With a proper understanding of the limitations and issues, and ideally supplemented with other datasets, the distribution of ceramics and...
Return to Yarinacocha: A pXRF and Petrographic Study of Ceramics Artifacts from the Tutishcainyo Site Series (1400 BCE–900 CE), Ucayali, Peru (2024)
This is an abstract from the "Ceramic Petrographers in the Americas: Recent Research and Methodological Advances" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology. When Donald Lathrap excavated a series of related archaeological sites on the shores of Yarinacocha, an oxbow lake of the Central Ucayali River in the Peruvian Amazon, the elaborately decorated pottery and long-occupied sites he uncovered contradicted the prevailing narrative of the Amazon as a...