The relationship between forming techniques and orientation of the components of ceramic materials in the context of pottery technology has long been recognized and used for identification of the techniques employed to create archaeological ceramics. The alignment of inclusions is usually characterized by qualitative categories or ordinal scales. This paper evaluates the potential of quantitative orientation analysis for identification of pottery-forming techniques. A collection of experimental pottery formed using five forming techniques and combined techniques was analysed. The forming techniques were characterized by the intervals of the mean direction and the circular standard deviations of the orientation of the major axes of the ellipses equivalent to the objects representing random sections of inclusions and voids. The most informative criteria for the identification of pottery techniques are the circular standard deviation of the inclusion/void orientations in the core area of the vessel wall in a perpendicular thin section and the mean direction in a tangential section.
Firing is a key step in the operational sequence of pottery technology and firing procedures affect many pottery characteristics. It is not clear whether these characteristics can be attributed to specific types of pottery structures. Analysis of 72 experimental pottery firings with a wide range of firing structures has shown that a significant difference exists between one-space and two-space firings, at the very least. The main criterion for description of the firing process consists in the firing procedure rather than the type of firing structure itself. Some types of firing structures are flexible in terms of applicable firing procedures; others, on the contrary, permit only a narrow range of firing procedures.
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