A Geochemical Database for Indigeneous Ceramics from South America

Summary

The indigenous peoples of South America have been producing pottery for more than 7,500 years. Pottery was made into vessels for the cooking and storage of foods, funerary urns, toys, sculptures, and a wide range of art forms. Due to the regional differences in the composition of raw materials used to manufacture and decorate pottery, geochemical investigations of pottery have proven successful for studying trade and exchange, changes in technology, provenance, etc. Some of the methods used to analyze pottery are neutron activation analysis, X-ray fluorescence, and inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry. All of these are capable of producing large quantities of data. Until recently, access to the geochemical data for pottery from South America has been lacking. A symposium describing several investigations of pottery from South America was held during the 2016 SAA meetings. Presentations from that symposium are now available in a publication from the University of New Mexico press entitled: "Geochemical Studies of Indigenous Ceramics from South America" edited by M.D. Glascock, H. Neff, and K.J. Vaughn. The geochemical and descriptive database associated with that volume are publically available from the following website: http://archaeometry.missouri.edu/datasets/index.html.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 82nd Annual Meeting, Vancouver, BC (2017)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 16799