Ceramics In Archaeology Research Paper

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Ceramics, or pottery, are among the oldest and most significant technological innovations in the history of humankind, the first truly synthetic material. Being highly plastic and thus virtually infinite in the range of shapes and forms possible, offering ready surfaces for decoration, and being ubiquitous in many archaeological contexts, ceramic containers and artifacts have provided archaeologists with one of their main categories of empirical data. Studies of variation in ceramic production, style, and use have assisted archaeologists both in the construction of chronologies and in the interpretation of ancient societies.

Ceramics denotes objects made from clay and fired to achieve hardness, which range from low-fired terracottas and earthenware’s (firing range 900–1200° C), through stonewares (1200–1350 ° C), to porcelains (1300–1450° C). Most archaeological analyses of ceramics are focused on earthenwares, which dominated pottery industries throughout most of prehistory. Aside from vessels and containers of all kinds, ceramic artifacts also include such important items as bricks and tiles, figurines and models, and tableware.

1. History Of Ceramics

The earliest human experimentation with clay— including the discovery that moist clay is plastic, can be shaped, and when heated or fired will retain its shaped form—is not well documented archaeologically. Fired clay figurines are known from the Dolnı Vestonice site in Czechoslovakia, dated to 30,000 BC. In the Old World, the first ceramic vessels appear in the early Jomon culture of Japan at about 10,000 BC, and in the Near East (Anatolia) at around 8500–8000 BC. Ceramics do not appear until considerably later in the New World, in several localities between 3000– 2500 BC. In all cases, the origins of ceramic vessels appear to be closely associated with sedentary modes of life, and with storage either of agricultural products or of quantities of gathered plant foods (as in the Jomon case). There is a high degree of correlation between sedentism and pottery making, as evident in a world ethnographic sample where only two out of 46 pottery-making societies are nonsedentary (Arnold 1985).

The oldest known pottery in the world is the ‘cord- marked’ Jomon pottery industry of Japan, dating to 10,000 BC and associated with sedentary or semi- sedentary hunter-gatherers. Jomon pottery is highly distinctive, both with its cord or string-impressed surface decoration, and its elaborate modeled rims; vessel forms are typically high jars or beakers. Else- where in the Far East, pottery appears in parts of China by around 7000 BC, if not earlier. The Yangshao-Culture, centered in the Yellow River valley of northern China and dating between 4800–4200 BC, is noted for its beautifully formed earthenware jars and dishes, decorated with red-and-black painted geometric designs. In later time periods, the Chinese perfected many technical aspects of ceramic production, such as the horizontal and vertical updraft kilns, the potter’s wheel, and high-fired stonewares and glazes. Porcelain ceramics were innovated in China sometime around the beginning of the first millennium AD, and were widely traded throughout the Old World, and later to Europe and the Americas.

In the Near East, architectural uses of clay (e.g., for walls, floors, and roofs) are widespread by around 7500 BC, in association with the domestication of plants and animals, and the origins of sedentary village life. Pottery containers appear by 8500–8000 BC in Anatolia, and slightly later in other parts of the Near East. A variety of other clay implements and artifacts are also characteristic of early Near Eastern sites, such as clay spindle whorls and loom weights, clay sickles (with obsidian or flint blades), clay toys and models, and clay stamps and cylinder seals. Ceramic technology was not independently developed in Europe, but rather was borrowed or diffused from the Near East, in association with the spread of agriculture and a sedentary mode of existence. In the classical world, of course, Greek blackand red-figured pottery (600–400 BC) represents a high level of technical and artistic achievement, as does slightly later Roman Arretine ware (100 BC–AD 400).

Ceramic technology in the New World arose considerably later in time, evidently as an independent development; moreover, the potter’s wheel and the use of glazes never developed in the New World. Between ca. 2500–2000 BC, pottery appears in several localities, including the coast of Columbia, the Pacific coast of Mexico, and in the southeastern United States. Among the outstanding pottery traditions of the New World, one must count the coastal Peruvian Nazca and Moche traditions (200 BC to AD 700) with their elaborated modeled anthropomorphic and zoomorphic vessels; the Late Classic Maya pottery which included exquisite polychrome funerary vessels; and the Pueblo pottery traditions of the southwestern United States.

2. Archaeological Approaches To Ceramics

Ceramics have played a central role in archaeological method and theory, for several reasons: (a) pottery has a long history, and is virtually ubiquitous in most sedentary societies; (b) pottery is nonperishable, and is often recovered in very large quantities from archaeological excavations; (c) pottery functioned both as utilitarian cooking, storage, and serving vessels for all strata of a society, as well as special purpose functions for elite ceremonial or funerary use; and, (d) as a highly plastic material, pottery displays seemingly infinite variation in composition, manufacturing method, shape, and decoration. These variations, moreover, were culturally conditioned, resulting in particular ceramic styles or traditions, which can be traced through time and space.

Early in the development of modern archaeology, scholars such as Flinders Petrie in Egypt, and somewhat later James Ford, Irving Rouse, and James Griffin in North America, recognized the value of ceramic studies in developing relative chronologies based on changes in ceramic style over time. Prior to the development of such absolute chronometric dating methods as radiocarbon or dendrochronology, the construction of ceramic chronologies were essential to developing local and regional time frames for prehistoric cultures.

With the rise of absolute dating methods in the second half of the twentieth century, archaeological studies of ceramics have shifted somewhat, with less emphasis on classification, seriation, and chronology construction, in favor of new approaches. These include detailed physical and chemical studies of ceramic composition and of production techniques and sequences, which inform archaeologists about the technology of ceramic production and use, and about the distribution and movement of ceramic vessels during their life spans. Such information in turn is useful to archaeologists who are attempting to understand prehistoric economic and sociopolitical organization.

2.1 Classification Of Ceramics

As perhaps the most plastic of all material culture media known in antiquity, ceramics exhibit enormous variation—in fabric, methods of production, shape, decoration, and function—offering tremendous advantages as well as challenges to the archaeologist. In order to bring some order to this variability, archaeologists must classify pottery into sets of like objects. The aims and methods of ceramic classification, however, depend greatly upon the particular archaeological approach. For example, a classification which is aimed at the discovery of historical types, those which show meaningful variation over time, will most likely emphasize different aspects of variation from a classification designed to exhibit key differences in manufacturing process. The literature on archaeological classification of ceramics is vast, but useful overviews may be found in Shepard (1965), Rice (1987), and Sinopoli (1991).

Ceramic classifications may be based on a number of different kinds of variables, the most common being technological dimensions, vessel shape, and decoration. Classifications based on technological dimensions are especially useful when the aim is to understand production processes, although such dimensions may also be useful in the definition of historical types. Major technological dimensions include raw materials (especially clay and nonplastic inclusions such as mineral temper), methods of vessel forming (such as coiling or slab building, and the use of the potter’s wheel), secondary treatments (such as the application of slips or glazes), and methods of firing (open air firing, use of kilns). Vessel shape may be classified formally according to various systems, such as that developed by Shepard (1965), which distinguishes between restricted and unrestricted vessels, and further between composite and inflected shapes. Vessel shape, naturally, is closely linked with vessel function. The third major category of variation used in ceramic classification is that of decoration and surface treatment. Possible surface treatments include slipped, glazed, burnished, polished, paddle-impressed, and smoothed. Decorations may be applied by painting, stamping, incising, carving, or other methods, such as three-dimension applique or relief. Designs used in decorations typically consist of individual design elements, which are systematically organized into motifs and larger decorative panels, and generally follow culturally-determined rules. The classification and analysis of such design systems may be based on individual motif catalogs and set of design rules (e.g., Mead et al. 1965), or on analysis of underlying principles of symmetry (e.g., Washburn 1977).

Methods of ceramic classification also vary. Pottery producers have their own indigenous or folk classification systems, which have been the subject of considerable ethno archaeological study (see Sect. 2.4 below). Formal archaeological procedures for classifying pottery include the well-developed ‘type-variety’ system, first applied in North America and later extended to Mesoamerica. This system uses a ‘binomial’ nomenclature, in which a geographic name is combined with some specific technological descriptor (e.g., ‘Barton incised’). Classification schemes range from simple paradigmatic classifications, to complex, hierarchical taxonomies. An alternative approach, much favored in the 1960s and 1970s, is quantitative or phenetic classification, in which ‘types’ are generated by a computer, following certain mathematical algorithms operating upon a number of qualitative and or quantitative parameters. The prime example of such a numerical taxonomy of ceramics is that of Clarke (1970) for the Bell Beaker pottery complex of Great Britain.

2.2 Ceramics And Chronology

The emphasis accorded ceramic studies by archaeologists reflects the importance of using ceramic change as a means for constructing cultural chronologies. In the late nineteenth century, pioneering Egyptologist Flinders Petrie recognized that pottery vessels which had been placed in tomb groups as funerary objects showed subtle but continuous stylistic changes over time. Petrie arranged representative vessels in an inferred chronological sequence, resulting in the first seriation of pottery.

The methods of seriation were greatly refined by American archaeologists, such as Irving Rouse and James A. Ford (Ford 1962), working with ceramic assemblages from various New World localities, including the Mississippi Valley region, and the Viru Valley of Peru. Their work generated much debate concerning the methods of ceramic classification and the reality of ceramic ‘types.’ The fundamental principle of seriation was to define a set of historical types which displayed gradual temporal changes, with a particular type arising at some point in time, gradually increasing in popularity (hence reflected by increased frequency in archaeological assemblages), and later decreasing until the type disappeared from the archaeological record. When the frequencies of such historical types were plotted as percentage diagrams, they displayed a characteristic frequency distribution resembling the plan of a battleship, and hence were known as ‘battleship curves.’

The great advantage of seriation was that it permitted the construction of cultural chronologies independent of any ‘absolute’ method of direct dating. Surface collections of potsherds from sites of unknown age could be tabulated according to the frequency of key ceramic types, and then chronologically ordered by arranging the frequency distributions to form ‘battleship curves.’ Moreover, local ceramic chronologies could be linked together using trade pottery which occurred in more than one region, or by tracing the diffusion of particular stylistic traits. With the invention of radiocarbon dating and other methods of ‘absolute’ dating in the later half of the twentieth century, the importance of seriation has declined, although it is still important as a cross-check on radiocarbon-based chronologies.

Pottery may also be directly dated, either by radiocarbon dating of organic inclusions within the ceramic fabric (i.e., dung or chaff included as temper), or by thermo luminescence (TL) dating. TL dating is based on the fact that when clay and other geological inclusions in pottery are fired at temperatures of 500 C or higher, electrons which had been ‘trapped’ in the crystal lattice structure are freed, emitting light or thermo luminescence. Following the firing process, new trapped electrons gradually accumulate in the crystalline imperfections of the pottery, as a natural consequence of radioactive decay. If ancient pottery is then reheated in the laboratory up to 500 C, and the emitted light is measured and plotted as a ‘glow curve’ of intensity vs. temperature, the age of the specimen can be calculated, since the intensity of light emitted will be proportional to age. There are, of course, many possible complications deriving from the geological composition of the fabric, and from post depositional conditions affecting the pottery. As a result, TL dating is less widely used than the radiocarbon method.

2.3 Compositional Studies

Within many ancient societies, pottery was produced by specialists who then traded, exchanged, or sold their wares to other nonpottery producing sectors of society, and or to other villages or geographic localities. Moreover, pottery was frequently traded or exchanged over considerable distances. Tracing the production, distribution, and specialized use of pottery in ancient societies requires that the archaeologist be able to characterize the unique composition of a particular ceramic product, typically a mix of clay and other nonplastic inclusions (including purposefully added ‘temper.’) A key phase in archaeological pottery analysis is thus ceramic characterization (Bishop et al. 1982). Characterization may also include efforts at sourcing, in which the materials that make up a particular ceramic ware are traced to their geographic points of origin, such as local clay quarries or sources of sand used as temper.

A wide range of mineralogical and geo-chemical techniques have been applied to ceramic compositional analysis, whether for characterization or sourcing. Petrographic analysis of the nonplastic inclusions within a ceramic fabric, in which the specific mineral grains are identified by examining a thin section of the pottery under a polarizing microscope, is a widely used technique. X-ray diffraction, which identifies minerals by their crystalline structures, is another frequently applied method for the characterization of pottery on the basis on the temper or nonplastic inclusions. Other techniques which have been applied more recently include optical emission spectroscopy, X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy, atomic absorption spectroscopy, neutron activation analysis, proton-induced X-ray emission, Mossbauer spectroscopy, electronic microprobe analysis, and inductively-coupled plasma analysis (see Rice 1987 for a review of these and other methods).

2.4 Ethnoarchaeology And Ceramics

Given the importance of ceramics in archaeology, it is not surprising that archaeologists have turned to traditional pottery-making societies to learn more about potential variability in ceramic production, distribution, use, and discard. The study of contemporary peoples, using ethnographic methods of participant-observation, in order to gain knowledge of material culture variability which is potentially applicable to the interpretation of archaeological assemblages, is called ethnoarchaeology. Ceramic ethnoarchaeology (Kramer 1985) is perhaps one of them most important subfields within this topic.

Because archaeologists had long been concerned with the classification of ceramics, a number of ethnoarchaeological studies have focused on the ways in which traditional potters classified or categorized their own products. Indigenous potters typically pay little attention to the technological attributes often accorded emphasis by archaeologists (such as details of temper, paste, surface treatment, or decoration), but rather emphasize general function in their folk classifications. Thus, among the Kalinga of the Philippines, pottery vessels are distinguished by whether they are intended for cooking rice or for cookin vegetables and meat, and by their sizes (Longacre 1981). The Fulani of Cameroon (David and Hennig 1972) lexically discriminate among five size classes of jars, with secondary classification based on their intended contents.

Other ethnoarchaeological studies of pottery have focused on aspects of ceramic production, including the social role or status of potters in their societies, on ceramic distribution, on the use of vessels, their life spans, and on their breakage and discard rates (see Kramer 1985 for a general review). Such studies have aided archaeologists in their interpretations of ancient ceramics by revealing the complex linkages between behavior and material culture, demonstrating that strictly utilitarian explanations for archaeological phenomena are not always preferable, and by showing that multiple lines of evidence may help to discriminate between alternative explanations.

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