From Clay Survey to Ceramic Provenance: Establishing a Ceramic Geography for the Late Classic Valley of Oaxaca

Summary

As an overall introduction to this session, this paper introduces our methodology for establishing ceramic provenance within the geologically complex Valley of Oaxaca. Natural clays have now been sampled from more than 300 locations throughout the valley, and their chemistry analyzed via INAA. Spatial averaging was used to create a series of smoothed contour maps showing how clay composition varies over space, and to generate a continuous reference grid of element concentrations against which ceramics can be compared. Within our corpus of Late Classic ceramics, we have identified at least 16 chemically distinct signatures which can be mapped on to these element maps, a strategy which allows us to identify where ceramics were produced and the spatial resolution that can be obtained in mapping those sources. The result is a "ceramic geography" useful for shedding light on intra-valley exchange networks within the Late Classic Valley of Oaxaca.

SAA 2015 abstracts made available in tDAR courtesy of the Society for American Archaeology and Center for Digital Antiquity Collaborative Program to improve digital data in archaeology. If you are the author of this presentation you may upload your paper, poster, presentation, or associated data (up to 3 files/30MB) for free. Please visit http://www.tdar.org/SAA2015 for instructions and more information.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 80th Annual Meeting, San Francisco, CA (2015)   •
• Mapping out Pottery Production and Exchange in the Late Classic Valley of Oaxaca, Mexico

Keywords

Spatial Coverage