Experimental Ceramic Technology: Colha, Belize

Summary

We have been very fortunate this year to have Dr. Fred Valdez, Luisa Aebersold and their team graciously contribute to our research program in ceramic technology. They took time during their extremely busy field season to bring clay for our team to prepare and attempt to build pottery at Programme for Belize Archaeological Field School.

We have two different types of clay to research. The first clay is yellow clay CH4444. The second clay is iron-rich, red clay CH2222. Our first task was to visually analyze the artifacts from the two different lots. Ch4444 was associated with archaic tools. CH2222 was associated with Preclassic pottery. We designed four different techniques to prepare the clays for our study. Our first group of CH2222 was aged directly in water and hand sieved. Both clays were moist from retrieval. This became problematic for the iron- rich clays. The clays were extremely difficult to break down. We dried them in open baskets.

The remaining CH2222 and CH4444 were prepared by hand. Due to the weather and the iron bearings clays these processes took several days to accomplish.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 21887