A Study of the Centuries-Long Reliance on Local Ceramics in Jerash Through Full Quantification and Simulation

Abstract

The Danish-German Jerash Northwest Quarter Project revealed a robust and striking pattern of the extreme dominance (>99%) of locally produced ceramics over six centuries and across different depositional contexts (in total over half a million pottery sherds). The archaeology of Jerash points towards an exceptional degree of self-sufficiency in craft products: why? The project team implemented a full quantification approach during excavation, manually and digitally recording and counting all pottery and other classes of artefacts. This enabled a full analysis of trends in production and use of ceramics throughout the archaeologically documented history of Jerash and revealed the unexpected pattern of the extreme dominance of local pottery. Archaeologists formulated a set of hypotheses to explain this pattern, and we developed an agent-based model of simple customer preference driving product distribution to evaluate several explanatory factors and their potential interactions. Our simulation results reveal that preference for locally produced ceramics at Jerash might be a plausible theory, but only if its intrinsic value was considered rather high in comparison to other goods, or if it was preferred by a majority of the population, and there was a tendency to follow this majority preference (or a combination of these factors). Here, we present a complete research pipeline of a full quantification of ceramics, analysis and modelling applicable at any archaeological site. We argue that transparent methods are necessary at all stages of an archaeological project: not only for data collection, management and analysis but also in theory development and testing. By focusing on a common archaeological material and by leveraging a range of widely available computational tools, we are able to better understand local and intra-regional distribution patterns of craft products in Jerash and in the ancient eastern Mediterranean.

A Bayesian alternative for Aoristic analyses in archaeology

“…The current 'go-to' solution in analysing archaeological datasets dated by means of relative chronologies is to employ a suite of techniques with a shared origin in aoristic analysis. The technique was initially developed in crime science (Ratcliffe & McCullagh, 1998), and after a few early applications in the early 2000s (Johnson, 2004;Mischka, 2004), it experienced mild success within archaeology (Baxter & Cool, 2016;Brozio et al, 2019;Crema, 2012;Franconi et al, 2023;Furlan, 2017;Hinz et al, 2019;Hoebe et al, 2023;Kleijne et al, 2020;Knitter et al, 2019;Levy et al, 2022;Orton et al, 2017;Palmisano et al, 2017Palmisano et al, , 2019Pollard, 2021;Roalkvam, 2022;Romandini et al, 2020;Romanowska et al, 2021;Stoddart et al, 2019;Taelman, 2022;Verhagen et al, 2016;Yubero-G omez et al, 2016), partly aided by the development of several dedicated R packages such as aoristic, datplot, archSeries, and kairos (Frerebeau, 2022;Orton et al, 2017;Ratcliffe, 2022;Steinmann & Weissova, 2021). The conceptual idea behind aoristic analysis is not new, and it is worth noting that similar ideas were independently introduced within archaeology before and after Ratcliffe's seminal paper (e.g.…”

Three hundred years of Palmyrene history. Unlocking archaeological data for studying past societal transformations

“…While it is not possible to demonstrate a direct causality link based on one dataset, this study establishes the first “benchmark” data trend, which can serve in the future as comparison for other, similar data analysis projects performed on other types of material culture evidence. Approaches in archaeology studying large and complex archaeological datasets when pulled together in one corpus and examined, on the one hand, and in archaeological and art-historical detail, on the other hand, within a larger framework of formal analysis methods are gaining popularity in Classical Archaeology [ 5 – 7 ], but they remain few and far between, not least because such detailed full-quantification studies–pulling together the entire known material of certain empirical group–demand extensive resources, which are often not available in projects within the humanities and social sciences, which traditionally work with legacy data, that is, the results and archival material of excavations before the 1960s, when the systematic collection of all material from an excavation began to be practiced widely, first in prehistoric archaeology [see 8 , 9 for criticisms of this methodology and theory].…”

“…As such, they can be used to better understand the long-term trajectories of human groups and the impact of different types of external factors, both negative perturbations and opportunities afforded by changing circumstances [e.g. 5 , 6 ].…”