The Identity of Potters in Early States: Determining the Age and Sex of Fingerprints on Early Bronze Age Pottery from Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

Kent D. Fowler, Elizabeth Walker, Haskel J. Greenfield, Jon Ross, Aren M. Maeir

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

The organization of craft production has long been a marker for broader social, economic, and political changes that accompanied urbanism. The identity of producers who comprised production groups, communities, or workshops is out of reach using conventional archaeological data. There has been some success using epidermal prints on artifacts to identify the age and sex of producers. However, while age estimates are well developed, determining the sex of ancient potters is complicated by similarities between the prints of adult women and adolescents of either sex. Forensic research indicates that a combination of ridge breadth and density would best identify the age and sex of individuals. To this end, we propose an identification framework to classify fingerprints grounded in experimental and forensic research. In this study, we classify 38 fingerprints on Early Bronze Age (EB) III pottery from the early urban neighborhood at Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel. Mean ridge breadth (MRB) and mean ridge density (MRD) are used to distinguish the age and sex of prints after accounting for the shrinkage of calcareous fabrics used to make four type of vessels. We apply a modified version of the Kamp et al. (1999) regression equation to the MRB for each individual print. The MRD data are correlated to comparable data from populations with appropriate ancestry to infer sex. When the results are combined, our analyses indicate that two thirds of the fingerprints were likely made by adult men and teenage boys and the remainder by adult women and adolescent girls. This result suggests that men or women were not exclusively making pottery at early urban centers in the Levant. This pattern contrasts a fingerprint study of post-state urban pottery production during the EB in northern Mesopotamia, which suggested women no longer made pottery after cities and states were established in the region.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)1470-1512
Number of pages43
JournalJournal of Archaeological Method and Theory
Volume26
Issue number4
DOIs
StatePublished - 1 Dec 2019

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© 2019, Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature.

Funding

The authors thank the staff and many volunteers on the Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath Archaeological Project. KF and EW would like to thank the volunteers who provided prints for the pilot study that assessed the methods. Special thanks must be extended to Shira Albaz for her unstinting patience and efforts in cataloging Area E pottery and sharing data on the Early Bronze typology for the Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath assemblage. Infrastructure and funding for the research was through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (410-2009-1303 to HG and 895-2011-1005 to HG and AM), The University of Manitoba, St. Paul’s College, Bar-Ilan University, and a University of Manitoba Undergraduate Research Award to EW. All data are available in the main text or the supplementary materials.

FundersFunder number
University of Manitoba, St. Paul’s College, Bar-Ilan University
University of Manitoba
Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada895-2011-1005, 410-2009-1303

    Keywords

    • Age and sex estimation
    • Ceramics
    • Early Bronze Age
    • Epidermal ridge breadth
    • Epidermal ridge density
    • Fingerprints
    • Israel
    • Levant
    • Palaeodermatoglyphics
    • Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath

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