Provenance Analysis of Tempering Materials using Quantitative Petrography in the Formative Basin of Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions" session, at the 84th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Ceramics sourcing studies in the Basin of Mexico suffer from the interior drainage problem. Sediment erodes from the mountains and mixes as it drains inward toward the lake at the center. Material composition, and the ceramics made from them, grades subtly over space as a result, making provenance analysis difficult. In a prior study, I used semi-quantitative analysis and a multitechnique approach to determine that, the aplastic fraction of Formative period pottery accounts for more geographically patterned compositional variability than the clay fraction (Stoner 2016). The hypothesis that drives the current research is that systematic point counting to derive a quantitative characterization of mineral assemblages on a scale from felsic to mafic composition will enable a clearer comparison to the natural geological variation within the region. I combine the petrographic data with chemical results from neutron activation analysis and laser ablation inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry to improve sourcing studies of pottery in the region and to add to the tools that ceramic analysts employ for characterizing ancient materials.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Cross-Cultural Petrographic Studies of Ceramic Traditions   •
• Society for American Archaeology 84th Annual Meeting, Albuquerque, NM (2019)

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 23668