The Recipes of Disaster in Northern Iroquoia: Integrating Digital Image Analysis into Petrographic Practice

Summary

European contact with Northern Iroquoian communities brought about a series of direct and indirect consequences. These involved European-disease epidemics and a series of migrations that moved people across the landscape as refugees, captives, or conquerors. Ceramic petrography offers a way for archaeologists to understand the impacts such demographic upheavals can have on technological systems. Iroquoian potters often use a recurrent set of rock and sand types that homogenize the paste-type assemblage, yet textural data (inclusion sizes, density, sorting, roundness, and sphericity) from thin sections can be used to explore micro-style changes in pottery production. However, constraints on time and levels of experience are often at odds with point counting procedures and recommended sample sizes for statistically significant studies. In this study, I couple qualitative and semi-quantitative assessments of petrographic samples with a digital textural analysis using the free open accessed program ImageJ (v. 1.51k) and Adobe Photoshop CC 2017. With this collection of techniques, I analyzed samples from two villages in the Neutral Iroquoian Confederacy that represent before and after chronologies for a series of demographic shifts to consider how these experiences altered paste preparation practices.

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): 22147