Calculating the Probability of Local Coarse Earthenware Manufacture at the 17th Century Coan Hall Site Utilizing pXRF Analysis

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Technology in Terrestrial and Underwater Archaeology" session, at the 2019 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Excavations at the Coan Hall site in Northumberland County Virginia, targeting the earliest permanent English settlement on the southern bank of the Potomac River, have uncovered sherds of low-fired, coarse earthenware ceramics with an unusual hematite-speckled paste. Moreover, fragments of daub have been recovered from the site which appear to be sourced from the same clay deposit. The chemical composition of these artifacts was estimated using X-ray Florescence and compared with the composition of brick fragments from the same contexts in order to determine 1) if the sherds were indeed from the same clay deposit and 2) if so, if their raw material could be matched to a local clay outcrop. Factors which affect the chemical composition of ceramics were distinguished using a principal component analysis and a hierarchical bayesian model was constructed to calculate the probability that each sherd was sourced from locally-mined clays.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Technology in Terrestrial and Underwater Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2019

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology

Record Identifiers

PaperId(s): 208