Tag: Archaeometry

 Reverse Engineering the Ceramic Cooking Pot: Cost and Performance Properties of Plain and Textured Vessels

Christopher Pierce 

Ceramic cooking pots throughout the world vary in exterior surface treatment from smooth to roughly textured. An intriguing example of this variation occurred in the Puebloan region of the southwestern United States where cooking pots changed from scraped plain to highly textured, corrugated vessels between the seventh and eleventh centuries AD, and then reverted back to plain-surfaced by the fifteenth century. To investigate potential cost and performance differences between plain and corrugated cooking pots, a set of controlled experiments were performed, which document manufacturing costs, cooking effectiveness, and vessel durability. These experiments indicate that while corrugation may have increased manufacturing costs, neck corrugations improved vessel handling, upper body corrugations yielded greater control over cooking, and basal corrugations extended vessel use-life. Discerning the explanatory significance of these results for cooking pot change in the Southwest and elsewhere requires additional data on the contexts in which these pots were made and used.

Published as:

Reverse engineering the ceramic cooking pot: Cost and performance properties of plain and textured vessels. Journal of Archaeological Method and Theory, Vol. 12, No. 2, pp. 117-157, June, 2005.

Download a PDF reprint of the published version of this paper.

Measuring Community Interaction: Pueblo III Pottery Production and Distribution in the Central Mesa Verde Region

Christopher Pierce, Donna M. Glowacki and Margaret M. Thurs

The scale, intensity, and character of interaction among Pueblo people during the 13th century A.D. likely played an important role in the processes and events leading to the abandonment of the Northern San Juan region in the 1280s. Characteristics of pottery production and distribution in the Sand Canyon locality provide one means of investigating these interactions. Variation among Pueblo III settlements in the use of temper and available raw clay sources, and the distribution of pottery production tools demonstrate the existence of at least two production areas within the locality. The nature of the boundary between these production areas indicates a complex pattern of settlement and community interaction that challenges models based on settlement proximity. Further, an almost complete lack of extra-regional pottery at Pueblo III settlements suggests that the Northern San Juan region may have been economically isolated from other regions inhabited by Pueblo people.

An edited version of this paper was publiahsed as:

Pierce, C., D. M. Glowacki, and M. M. Thurs
2002 Measuring Community Interaction: Pueblo III Pottery Production and Distribution in the Central Mesa Verde Region. In Seeking the Center Place: Archaeology and Community in the Mesa Verde Region, edited by M.D. Varien and R. Wilshusen, pp. 185-202. The University of Utah, Salt Lake City.

 Instructions for Running the Pocket Gopher Disturbance Simulation

This program simulates the effects that burrowing by pocket gophers have on the vertical distribution of artifacts and sediments and the disruption of sedimentary structures (stratification) within archaeological deposits. It relies on a model of pocket gopher disturbance I developed intermittently between 1981 and 1986. Details of this model are presented in an article I published in the journal Geoarchaeology (vol. 7, no. 3, pp. 185-208) in 1992 titled Effects of Pocket Gopher Burrowing on Archaeological Deposits: A Simulation Approach. Click here to read about the history of my development of the model.

EXPLORING FUNCTIONAL VARIATION IN FIRE-ALTERED ROCKS

Christopher Pierce

Paper presented at the 54th Annual Meeting of the Society for American Archaeology

Atlanta, Georgia 1989

Fire-altered rocks, as the name implies, are rocks that show signs of alteration resulting from exposure to extreme heat. These rocks are often referred to as "fire-cracked rocks" by archaeologists because cracking is a common and readily distinguishable form of alteration. The archaeological record in many areas of the world contains great quantities of fire-altered rocks and these rocks were recognized early on as artifacts. However, the lack of stylistic attributes of most fire-altered rocks lead, understandably, to their neglect by archaeologists devoted to working out culture histories. More recently, a growing concern with functional or analogous variation has lead some archaeologist, primarily in the past decade, to look more closely at fire-altered rocks as a source of information about the past (e.g., Ericson 1972; McDowell-Loudan 1983; Pierce 1982, 1988; Roll 1982; Thoms 1986; Van Dyke, et al 1980). Although these studies have served to increase the awareness of the potential of fire-altered rock studies in some areas, in general, archaeologists continue to ignore these artifacts. Consequently, we still know exceedingly little about the nature and significance of variation in fire-altered rocks.