Year: 2015
Type: article
Abstract: The success of pottery provenance studies is fundamentally dependent upon spatially patterned variation in the composition of exploited clay resources. Uniformity in clay composition within a region and recognizable differences between regions of interest are essential requirements for determining provenance, but these parameters are difficult to satisfy in study areas such as the coastal plain of the southeastern USA in which chemical and mineralogical variation tend toward continuous gradients. In an attempt to improve the reliability and validity of pottery provenance studies in the area, this research investigates compositional variation in raw clay samples from across Florida and southern Georgia through NAA (n=130) and petrographic analysis (n=99). The results indicate that fourteen distinct compositional regions can be differentiated, ranging from 50 km to 400 km in length. These regions dictate the direction and minimum distance a pottery vessel must have been transported in order to be recognized as nonlocal through compositional analysis. The validity of the proposed compositional regions is supported by previous case studies focused on assemblages from three of the regions. In each case, vessels were transported from other compositional regions more than 100 km away.
Language: English
Subfield: Archeology
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $969
Awards: Support for the Archaeometry Laboratory at MURR, Support for the Archaeometry Laboratory at MURR, Doctoral Dissertation Research: Places of Gathering: Orange Pottery Variability and the Social Scale of Late Archaic Shell Mound Interaction in Northeast Florida, Collaborative Research: Sourcing Interaction in the Woodland Period Southeast U.S.: Integrated Approaches to Swift Creek Ceramics
OpenAlex ID: W2320054570