Iroquoian Ceramic Data

Data on some 10,000 New York Iroquois ceramic vessels.

William Engelbrecht began collecting ceramic data in 1968 for his Ph.D. dissertation, A Stylistic Analysis of New York Iroquois Pottery, University of Michigan, 1971 (now uploaded to tDAR). Ceramic attributes and ceramic types were recorded from Iroquoian village sites across New York State dating between the 15th and mid-17th centuries. After his dissertation research, Engelbrecht continued to add to these data. At present, over 10,000 ceramic vessels from 70 Iroquoian sites are represented in this project.

All the sites are briefly described in a document, About the Sites. The document, The Coding Sheet, describes the codes used for ceramic attribute categories and their values. For analysis, many of these values were grouped into larger categories. For example, vessel collar height was measured to the nearest millimeter, but for analysis only five height classes were used (1-11 mm, 12-21 mm, 22-31 mm, 32-41 mm, 42-99 mm). These regrouped attributes are listed in the document, The Coding Sheet along with the original attributes. A third document, The Recording Form document, reproduces the actual form used to record data. One recording form sheet was used for each vessel or portion of a vessel. Some 10,000 of these are now in the archives of Butler Library at Buffalo State College. The contents of a recording form are represented in tDAR as a row of data in a file. All three documents, About the Sites, The Recording Form, and The Coding Sheet, have been uploaded to this project.

In this project, each of the 70 sites is associated with two files: 1) the original attributes recorded and 2) the regrouped attributes. These were originally SPSS files, the former with the extension “.odata” and the latter with the extension “.rpt”. Conversion of these files to a format compatible with tDAR proved to be a major challenge. I hired Rob Peltier with this grant to assist with uploading these files but he encountered numerous difficulties. Initially, technical support staff at Buffalo State were not able to assist with this. We found the following on line: “How to convert SPSS files to Excel.” Initially, these were not helpful until we realized that we needed to have SPSS installed on the computer we were using. Paul Reynolds of Computer Services at Buffalo State gave us access to a computer with SPSS and further assisted us. Though we were able to convert the SPSS files to Excel files, we found that the alignment between the column headings and the values did not match up, making reading the files difficult and confusing. We found that the data display looked best if we turned the SPSS files into a pdf format and uploaded them to tDAR. Thus, the attribute files have been uploaded as document files, even though they are actually data files.

A second goal was to upload articles using these data. These articles were scanned and uploaded by William Engelbrecht.