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11. Review of Ceramic Compositional Studies from In and Around the Mississippi Valley
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11 Review of Ceramic Compositional Studies from In and Around the Mississippi Valley Hector Neff Introduction This chapter summarizes published and unpublished ceramic compositional studies undertaken over the past half-century relevant to the archaeology of the Yazoo Basin and vicinity. In general terms, the objective of these studies has been to examine patterns of interaction among prehistoric populations , both within the Mississippi valley and between the valley and adjacent regions. Time periods addressed span the range from Late Archaic through Mississippian. A number of projects have examined ceramic compositional variation in the Southeast and/or in the Lower Mississippi Valley (LMV). Perhaps the closest project directly relevant to the study area is a pilot project by Peacock and his colleagues (Peacock et al. 2003) examining the possibility that consistent differences in shell temper composition could be used to identify pottery that moved between drainages. Although preliminary results are promising, no conclusive data bearing on prehistoric interaction patterns have yet emerged from this project. Aside from the shell temper characterization work of Peacock and colleagues , ceramic-characterization studies in the Mississippi valley can be categorized as either based on mineralogical characterization of paste inclusions or on elemental characterization of whole ceramic pastes (including both clay and nonplastic inclusions). The former approach typically relies heavily on optical petrography, whereas the latter has relied most heavily on instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA). Because many more projects have been undertaken and many more samples have been analyzed via INAA, I devote most attention in this chapter to INAA studies. I present a brief summary of mineralogical studies first. 224 / Hector Neff Mineralogical Characterization of Mississippi Valley Ceramics Petrographic analysis of ceramic pastes has been used sporadically within the Mississippi valley since the 1950s. Elizabeth Weaver (1963) built on Anna Shepard’s methods for texture analysis in a study of Tchula pottery from the LMV, concluding that the importance of natural as opposed to added inclusions of fiber and sand may have been underestimated. Shepard (1964) praised Weaver’s study as an example of “balance at a time when interest is centered in physical methods of analysis that yield chemical data,” initiating a spurious yet persistent opposition between petrographic and chemical approaches (e.g., Stoltman and Mainfort 2002). In another comment on Weaver’s study, James Warren Porter (1964) describes his own observations and experiments with grog tempering, which lead him to doubt Weaver’s conclusion that Tchula pottery is untempered. Galaty (this volume) further discusses this issue. Bareis and Porter (1965) used mineralogical techniques to resolve questions about the source of an engraved, Caddoan-like bowl recovered from a burial at Cahokia. Porter studied the vessel paste both in thin section and crushed and mounted in refractive-index oils, and he had powder X-ray diffraction run to identify clay and nonplastic minerals. Comparisons with a larger collection of thin sections from Cahokia and nearby sites indicated that the vessel was nonlocal to the American Bottom, and assessment of the geology in surrounding regions pointed to the margins of the LMV as the most likely source. The basic methods employed in this study—comparing suspected imports to the range of variation in presumed local materials and considering geological characteristics of potential foreign sources—generalize quite easily to provenance investigations based on chemical characterization (e.g., Steponaitis et al. 1996). Stoltman (1989, 1991) has also used petrographic analysis in studies of Mississippi valley ceramics. He employs a point-counting technique that quantifies the amount of “grit,” matrix, and sand in sherds, and assumes that shared textural characteristics imply a shared production location and tradition . Although he argues that elemental and petrographic techniques are complementary , Stoltman (1989:158) voices the traditional ceramic petrographer’s defensiveness (e.g., Shepard 1964), when he states that petrography is “perhaps in jeopardy of being overlooked due to recent technological advances in elemental identification.” An alternative approach to quantifying texture characteristics involves image analysis of thin sections (e.g., Livingood 2003; Ortmann and Kidder 2004). In one study of ceramic fabrics from the LMV, Ortmann and Kidder (2004) address the question of whether the Poverty Point ceramic tradition, which includes untempered and fiber-tempered variants, was an indigenous develop- [3.209.56.116] Project MUSE (2024-03-29 11:59 GMT) Review of Ceramic Compositional Studies / 225 ment or comprised mainly imported pottery. Image analysis of thin sections and subsequent statistical analysis of the data suggested that most sherds were within the range of textural variation of local...