Abstract
Cooking pots and bowls from two production locations ca. 200 m from each other at the rural settlement of Kefar Hananya in Roman Galilee were compared employing chemical element composition and vessel-shape analyses. Splits of each pulverized sample, all of which were taken from ceramic wasters, were analyzed by both instrumental neutron activation and high-precision X-ray fluorescence analyses, and computerized vessel-shape analysis was employed for morphological analysis of the same vessel forms from each location. Several statistical techniques (bivariate plots, principal component analysis, cluster analysis and discriminant analysis) were used for analyzing the resultant data. It was found that both the cooking pots and bowls made at each location could be distinguished by employing either chemical composition or morphological analysis. The implications of this work, with regard to investigating both production and consumption sites, and for pottery provenance studies, are discussed. The findings suggest that these analytical techniques can be useful as an aid for chronological differentiations of archaeological pottery.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Pages (from-to) | 2517-2530 |
| Number of pages | 14 |
| Journal | Journal of Archaeological Science |
| Volume | 36 |
| Issue number | 11 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Nov 2009 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:We are appreciative of the assistance of the reactor staff of the Missouri University Research Reactor at Columbia, Missouri, in providing neutron irradiations. We thank Y. Rinott, Hebrew University, for his counsel on the statistical evaluation of the chemical compositional data, and D.E. Arnold for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. N. Akiva, T. Almog, and D. Oropeza helped with the preparation of Kefar Hananya samples for chemical composition analysis. We appreciate the efforts of M.D. Levine, N. Padgett, S. Lauer, and M. Kislev in facilitating the work. The work described in this paper was supported by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences Division of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC03-76F00098, and by National Science Foundation Grant BCS 0002682 and Israel Science Foundation Grant 168/06.
Funding
We are appreciative of the assistance of the reactor staff of the Missouri University Research Reactor at Columbia, Missouri, in providing neutron irradiations. We thank Y. Rinott, Hebrew University, for his counsel on the statistical evaluation of the chemical compositional data, and D.E. Arnold for his comments on an earlier draft of this paper. N. Akiva, T. Almog, and D. Oropeza helped with the preparation of Kefar Hananya samples for chemical composition analysis. We appreciate the efforts of M.D. Levine, N. Padgett, S. Lauer, and M. Kislev in facilitating the work. The work described in this paper was supported by the Director, Office of Energy Research, Office of Basic Energy Sciences, Chemical Sciences Division of the U.S. Department of Energy under contract no. DE-AC03-76F00098, and by National Science Foundation Grant BCS 0002682 and Israel Science Foundation Grant 168/06.
| Funders | Funder number |
|---|---|
| Office of Energy Research | |
| National Science Foundation | BCS 0002682 |
| U.S. Department of Energy | DE-AC03-76F00098 |
| Basic Energy Sciences | |
| Israel Science Foundation | 168/06 |
Keywords
- Chemical element composition
- Intrasite differentiation
- Kefar Hananya
- Pottery production
- Roman period
- Vessel morphology