Archaeological Ceramics Interpreting Artefacts

An inorganic non-metallic solid made up of either metal or non-metal compounds that has been shaped and then hardened by heating to high temperatures is referred to as a ceramic. Earthenware, porcelain, and brick are some of the common examples of ceramics. In archeology, ceramic artifacts have an important role in understanding the culture, technology, and behavior of peoples of the past. They are among the most common artifacts that are found at an archaeological site, especially in the form of small fragments of broken pottery called sherds. This book brings forth some of the most innovative concepts and elucidates the unexplored aspects of archeological ceramics. Its aim is to present researches that have transformed this discipline and aided its advancement. This book will serve as a reference to a broad spectrum of readers.

This volume presents a range of petrographic case studies as applied to archaeological problems, primarily in the field of pottery analysis, i.e. ceramic petrography.

Thin section ceramic petrography is a versatile interdisciplinary analytical tool for the characterization and interpretation of archaeological pottery. Using over 200 photomicrographs of thin sections from a diverse range of artefacts, time periods and geographic regions, this provides comprehensive guidelines for their study within archaeology.

The aim of Artefacts as Categories is to ask what we can learn about a society from the variability of the objects it produces. Dr Miller presents a comprehensive analysis of the pottery produced in a single village in central India, drawing together and analysing a whole range of aspects - technology, function, design, symbolism and ideology - that are usually studied separately. Using the concepts of 'pragmatics', 'framing' and 'ideology', the author points to the insufficiency of many ethnographic accounts of symbolism and underlines the need to consider both the social positioning of the interpreter and the context of the interpretation when looking at artefacts. His invigorating study cogently questions many assumptions in material culture studies and offers a whole range of fresh explanations. Archaeologists in particular will welcome the discussion of familiar materials such as pottery rim shapes, body forms and decoration. However, the book will have a broad appeal to researchers in cultural studies, social anthropology and psychology and will attract all those interested in the problem of relating objects and society.

Daniel Albero Santacreu presents a wide overview of certain aspects of the pottery analysis and summarizes most of the methodological and theoretical information currently applied in archaeology in order to develop wide and deep analysis of ceramic pastes. The book provides an adequate framework for understanding the way pottery production is organised and clarifies the meaning and role of the pottery in archaeological and traditional societies. The goal of this book is to encourage reflection, especially by those researchers who face the analysis of ceramics for the first time, by providing a background for the generation of their own research and to formulate their own questions depending on their concerns and interests. The three-part structure of the book allows readers to move easily from the analysis of the reality and ceramic material culture to the world of the ideas and theories and to develop a dialogue between data and their interpretation. Daniel Albero Santacreu is a Lecturer Assistant in the University of the Balearic Islands, member of the Research Group Arqueo UIB and the Ceramic Petrology Group. He has carried out the analysis of ceramics from several prehistoric societies placed in the Western Mediterranean, as well as the study of handmade pottery from contemporary ethnic groups in Northeast Ghana.

During the last forty odd years, archaeological surveys have demonstrated that much can be said about changing patterns of regional exchange and settlement hierarchies based on surface observations. Walking the Mediterranean landscape, the most common indication of ancient human activity survey archaeologists come across are scatters of pottery and other ceramics. Enormous numbers of sherds are counted, collected, recorded, and interpreted in order to understand the ancient cultural, social, economic, and ritual landscapes. Some discrete scatters of ancient artefacts are interpreted as sites where people have lived and/or worked based on an analysis of both cultural and environmental data. These artefact scatters are modern phenomena affected by complex post-depositional processes such as cultivation which obscure potentional behavioural patterning. Artefact-based survey with its treatment of artefacts behaving as sediments in the soil enhanced with a detailed pottery analysis centred on use has the potential to greatly increase our understanding of the ancient rural world. This book offers an attempt to create a methodology for hypothesizing about the general activities taking place at sites identified by survey based on ceramics. The use typology is put forward as a tool for studying artefactual differentiation, and the method consists of establishing empirically generalized pottery indices of different human activities based on artefactual differentiation at Late Roman sites in Cyprus.

Plog argues that there are many more factors that cause design or stylistic variations on prehistoric artifacts than have been previously acknowledged. Using data primarily from the American Southwest, he shows why the methods of design analysis that have been used are often inappropriate, and presents a new framework of explanation.

This volume draws together topics and methodologies essential for the socio-cultural, mineralogical, and geochemical analysis of archaeological ceramic, one of the most complex and ubiquitous archaeomaterials in the archaeological record. It provides an invaluable resource for archaeologists, anthropologists, and archaeological materials scientists.

All of the editors of this volume have often been occupied (if not preoccupied) with ceramic artifact identification and cataloguing.We have participated in workshops and symposia in several venues and have all spent time sorting, categorizing, and dating ceramics.We urgently (and selfishly) felt there was a distinct need for a volume with a Western perspective, one containing original essays in addition to particularly useful primary and secondary sources.The dilemma facing us was to find succinct reference information that would not only cover the broad spectrum of ceramic forms but also target what we were actually finding in California's archaeological sites. Essays chosen for this volume emphasize identifying ceramics and gathering relevant information for the identification and cataloging process.