Finding Fire: Techniques for Identifying Ephemeral Ceramic Firing Features in the Archaeological Record

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Firing is an important step in the life history of ceramic objects, or what some would refer to as a châine opératoire. The firing environment of ceramics can yield insights into changes in fuel choice and abundance, labor estimates, degree of craft specialization, and perhaps even ritual and belief. In contrast with formal firing structures, such as kilns, or large firing features, such as large-scale communal open bonfire firings, the detection of small-scale, open firing features can be difficult. For one, they can easily be confused with hearths. Research presented here explores a possible open firing feature from the northern North American Great Plains at the Elbee Site in the Knife River Indian Villages National Historic Site, North Dakota. Step-wise clay oxidation analysis, experimental archaeology, and microarchaeology (micromorphology, charcoal reflectance, micro-FTIR, SEM) are combined with excavation data and ethnoarchaeological cases to build a model of inference.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• SAA 2024: Individual Abstracts   •
• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 40313.0