Developing Reproducible Methods for Defining and Evaluating Ceramic Compositional Groups Derived from NAA and LA-ICP-MS

Summary

The Digital Archaeological Archive of Comparative Slavery (DAACS), in collaboration with MURR and UNC Research Laboratories of Archaeology, has analyzed the elemental composition of nearly 400 coarse earthenware sherds from eighteenth and early nineteenth century plantation contexts from Jamaica. All of the sherds were analyzed using Neutron Activation Analysis (NAA), while nearly forty percent of these same sherds were analyzed via laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). We develop a transparent workflow in R for identifying trial compositional groups and then evaluating them. We apply this workflow to elemental datasets generated by the two methods and compare the results, highlighting differences in the number of groups and relationships among sherd assignments to those groups. Finally, we assess the agreement among methods for evaluating our ideas about ceramic and manufacturing networks in early Jamaica.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 83rd Annual Meeting, Washington, DC (2018)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 22260