Sourcing Surface Treatments on Whiteware Ceramics from Southeast Utah Great House Communities

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Previous elemental research on ceramics from Chacoan Great Houses in southeast Utah produced unexpected results. Whereas painted whiteware serving bowls are traditionally thought more likely to be traded or procured from further away than grayware cooking pots, neutron activation analysis (NAA) of the ceramic pastes of whiteware and grayware sherds from these communities found the opposite. This poster presents the results of a follow-up 2018 laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS) analysis of surface treatments (slips and paints) of a subset of the same white ware sherds. The goal of the study was to determine if the source areas and procurement groups suggested by chemical signatures of the surface treatments (slips and paints) corresponded with those previously determined for the paste of the sherds. The results indicated there was no grouping of slip clays into distinct source-area groups and that paints could not be grouped beyond carbon/mineral distinction, suggesting less distinction and less grouped variation in slip and paint recipes than in paste recipes. Understanding the composition and sourcing of surface treatments provides insights about the nature of pottery production and trade in the ancient Southwest, including revealing differences in procurement networks for different components of pottery production.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Twenty Years of Archaeological Science at the Field Museum’s Elemental Analysis Facility   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Spatial Coverage

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 38118.0