Ceramic Petrography as a Technique for Documenting Cultural Interaction: An Example from the Upper Mississippi Valley

Abstract

The petrographic identification of ceramic tempers has long been known to be a fruitful line of inquiry for investigating intersite and interregional cultural interaction. By applying point-counting procedures to the recording of natural as well as humanly added mineral inclusions in ceramic thin sections, considerable power can be added to this traditionally qualitative technique. The effectiveness of this more quantitative approach in discriminating local from nonlocal vessels is demonstrated through a comparative analysis of two Middle Mississippian-contact sites in the upper Mississippi Valley region-Hartley Fort in northeast Iowa and the Fred Edwards site in southwest Wisconsin.