Ceramic Color Variation in the Lake Pátzcuaro Basin, Michoacán, Mexico

Summary

This is an abstract from the "SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Color is often a key variable to create and maintain different groupings in ceramic classification schemas. While the classification schema for ceramics for the Lake Pátzcaruo Basin and the cultural formations leading to the Late Postclassic Tarascan (P’urépecha) state and empire (Late Postclassic, ca AD 1350 to 1522) emphasizes paste, color is still an important within and between group variable. This Basin typology was created in the 1970s and applied both a Type-Variety and Modal Analysis. Building on the methodology of Ruck and Brown’s 2015 article, “Quantitative Analysis of Munsell Color Data From Archaeological Ceramics”, we measure the color variation in a subset of the Basin type collection to compare with both the original color identifications and with previous research on chemical characterization of the paste categories.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• SAA 2025: Individual Abstracts

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 53089