Preliminary Results of Petrographic and Chemical Analyses of Lapita Pottery Assemblage Excavated from Kurin Site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2019: General Sessions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

In this paper, we will illustrate the number of possible pottery-making locations that we have identified so far from the Lapita pottery assemblage excavated at Kurin site, Mare Island, Loyalty Islands, New Caledonia. We first examined the non-plastic inclusions to determine whether minerals and rock fragments identified through a petrographic microscope may occur naturally within a given geological region of New Caledonia, and use index minerals and rock fragments to separate various possible pottery production locations within such large geological regions. We then compare samples from multiple sites that have been assumed to be produced from the same location to determine whether there is a consistency in terms of temper types within a particular production location. In addition, we compared chemical compositional data of these samples in order to better differentiate local vs. non-local samples. We are able to identify multiple possible locations on both northern and southern Grande Terre for the 29 samples that we processed. In the end, we will summarize our preliminary results and discuss possible exchange networks observed.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 25365