Fingerprints on Early Minoan pottery: a pilot study

Branigan, Keith; Papadatos, Yiannis; Wynn, Douglas

doi:10.1017/s0068245400017330

Cited by 11 publications

(4 citation statements)

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“…It is not known if prints are actually rare on ceramics [2]. The preservation of prints likely results from a complex mix of factors: the use of surface finishing or decorative treatments, how objects were handled during manufacture, whether potters noticed or cared whether prints were on vessels, how objects were used, and a range of post-depositional conditions [3].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

et al. 2020

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The organization of craft production has long been a marker for broader social, economic and political changes that accompanied urbanism. The identity of producers who comprised production groups, communities, or workshops is out of reach using conventional archaeological data. There has been some success using epidermal prints on artefacts to identify the age and sex of producers. However, forensic research indicates that a combination of ridge breadth and ridge density would best identify the age and sex of individuals. To this end, we combine mean ridge breadth (MRB) and mean ridge density (MRD) to distinguish the age and sex of 112 fingerprints on Early Bronze Age (EB) III pottery from the early urban neighbourhood at Tell eṡ-Ṡ â fi/Gath, Israel, dating to a 100 year time span. Our analysis accounts for the shrinkage of calcareous fabrics used to make six type of vessels, applies a modified version of the Kamp et al. regression equation to the MRB for each individual print, and infers sex by correlating MRD data to appropriate modern reference populations. When the results are combined, our analyses indicate that most fingerprints were made by adult and young males and the remainder by adult and young females. Children's prints are in evidence but only occur on handles. Multiple prints of different age and sex on the same vessels suggest they were impressed during the training of young potters. Production appears dominated by adult and young males working alone, together, and in cooperation with adult and/or young females. Vessels with prints exclusively by females of any age are rare. This male dominant cooperative labour pattern contrasts recent studies showing that adult women primarily made Neolithic figurines in Anatolia, and more females than males were making pottery prior to the rise of city-states in northern Mesopotamia.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

et al. 2020

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“…Another material category of the Bronze Age Aegean which fingerprint research has addressed is ceramics (e.g. Branigan et al 2002;Hruby 2007). Some fingerprint explorations are by-products of a research agenda which focuses on such as craft specialization and transmission; other studies have tried to assess the age and sex of the potters, within wider such archaeological agendas.…”

Section: Where Are We Now?mentioning

confidence: 99%

An Archaeology of Body Traces: Finding Everyday Hands From Minoan Crete

Simandiraki‐Grimshaw

2024

Oxford J Archaeology

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SummaryThe traces of marks left by human bodies on surviving archaeological artefacts can be a rich and informative source for understanding everyday individuals and their practices in the past. Nevertheless, such traces have tended to be neglected or generalized in archaeology, in favour of elite artefacts and manufacturing statistics – or in pursuit of ‘clean’, forensically amenable evidence, e.g. dry fingerprints. Using two case studies from Bronze Age Crete, this paper calls for an attitudinal, as much as a methodological, shift in how we exploit the remnants of gestural preferences, limitations and mistakes which we have hitherto chosen to dismiss. I argue that, if we want to understand nameless individuals of past societies, we need to overcome our implicit aversion to the mundane and everyday and to find new ways of exploring the ‘messy’, inconvenient, but also abundant fleeting moments of bodies no longer extant.

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“…The study of fingerprints on archaeological objects has gained traction in the last few years (e.g. Branigan et al 2002; Hruby 2007; Sanders 2015; see also the Journal on Ancient Fingerprints ). Stinson (2004), for example, analysed fingerprints from a large corpus of Hohokam clay figurines in an attempt to identify the sex of the individuals who used them.…”

Section: Case Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Digital Sensoriality: The Neolithic Figurines from Koutroulou Magoula, Greece

Papadopoulos¹,

Hamilakis²,

Kyparissi‐Apostolika³

et al. 2019

CAJ

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The image-based discourse on clay figurines that treated them as merely artistic representations, the meaning of which needs to be deciphered through various iconological methods, has been severely critiqued and challenged in the past decade. This discourse, however, has largely shaped the way that figurines are depicted in archaeological iterations and publications, and it is this corpus of images that has in turn shaped further thinking and discussion on figurines, especially since very few people are able to handle the original, three-dimensional, physical objects. Building on the changing intellectual climate in figurine studies, we propose here a framework that treats figurines as multi-sensorial, affective and dynamic objects, acting within distinctive, relational fields of sensoriality. Furthermore, we situate a range of digital, computational methods within this framework in an attempt to deprive them of their latent Cartesianism and mentalism, and we demonstrate how we have applied them to the study of Neolithic figurines from the site of Koutroulou Magoula in Greece. We argue that such methodologies, situated within an experiential framework, not only provide new means of understanding, interpretation and dissemination, but, most importantly, enable researchers and the public to explore the sensorial affordances and affective potential of things, in the past as well as in the present.

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Fingerprints on Early Minoan pottery: a pilot study

Cited by 11 publications

References 0 publications

Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

Fingerprint evidence for the division of labour and learning pottery-making at Early Bronze Age Tell eṣ-Ṣâfi/Gath, Israel

An Archaeology of Body Traces: Finding Everyday Hands From Minoan Crete

Digital Sensoriality: The Neolithic Figurines from Koutroulou Magoula, Greece

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