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September 1, 2006
Friday Pot Blogging
Over the last few weeks I have shown as series of pottery oil lamps each of which represents the next more recent archaeological era. Today, I would like to use a couple of the lamps I have presented to illustrate a problem and an opportunity when using pottery, and not just lamps, for dating archaeological remains. You may remember this picture of a Late Bronze age lamp that I presented a couple of weeks ago.
And then the next week after that I showed this Iron I Age lamp.
At the time I posted on the Late Bronze Age lamp, I made this observation,
Some lamps from the end of the Late Bronze period show a flaring out of the rim that is not seen in the example shown above. You'll see what I mean next week when we look at an Iron Age I lamp.
To illustrate this, here are drawings, top and side views, of two lamps found at Tell Aphek. 
The drawing are from Beck and Kochave, 57. Notice that the lamp drawn on the left has the same general shape as the Iron I Age lamp pictured above (look a the rim) and the lamp drawn on the right looks like the Late Bronze Age lamp. Well, both of these lamps were found in the so-called Egyptian Governor's Residence at Aphek that, based on the contents of a letter from Ugarit found there, was in use circa 1230 BCE. The Residence was destroyed sometime after this date but still within what is generally thought of as the Late Bronze Age. Here is what Beck and Kochave, 53, say with regards to the lamps they found,
The appearance of oil lamps with splayed rim together with those with plain rim is, again, indicative of the last phase of the Late Bronze Age.
If you read the whole paper from which I took this quotation, you'll see that they have lots of other pottery evidence that points in the same direction.
The point that I want to make is that a single pot or diagnostic sherd does not, in most cases, give a clear indication of the age or even era of an architectural feature with which it is associated. A diagnostic sherd is a piece of broken pottery, a rim or a base or some other feature, that gives the archaeologists confidence that they can identify the type, complete shape and so forth of the pot from which it came. For example, a sherd from the rim of an oil lamp just before the wick pinch would likely be diagnostic even if it were quite small. What is needed for dating is usually an assemblage of pottery that can be compared with pottery from other sites to provide a synchronism between the two sites. For the purposes of this post, an "assemblage of pottery" should be understood as a group of pots and potsherds that were found in the same archaeological context and because of that context can be assumed to have been in use at the same time. The most useful assemblages will contain cooking pot, storage jars, cups, bowls, jugs, even lamps, etc. If it is possible to give an absolute date or range of dates based on a comparable assemblage at some other site then one can reasonably infer that same date range for the related artifacts where the new assemblage was found. It helps if they are nearby and/or show the same material culture in other respects. Absolute dates are, on occasion, provided by dated inscriptions or tablets at one site or another that share the contents of a pottery assemblage. The letter from Ugarit at Aphel is an example of such a lucky happenstance. In so far that it was otherwise unknown, the letter helps date the pottery assemblage at Aphek and the Governor's Residence. Such information can then be used to date similar pottery assemblages at other sites. More commonly, absolute dates come from associating archaeological remains, including pottery assemblages, with well documented events in Egypt or Mesopotamia. Yes, there are a few occasions where archaeological remains can be associated with datable events in nature, but then, as the song says, "too few to mention."
But even with a large assemblage of pottery representing many different types of pots, lamps, cooking pots, storage jars, etc., there is always room for discussion and confusion. During much of the Iron Age, for example, there were at least three cultures in what is now Palestine and Israel as well as parts of modern Jordan, Lebanon and Syria. For lack of better words I will call them Philistine, Canaanite and Israelite cultures. And in the case of the Israelite material culture (and language), there is clear evidence of north/south differences. The diffusion rate of new pottery forms was likely different both between cultures and within each culture and subculture.
In addition, the pottery to be used in such studies must be excavated so it is free of contamination by being mixed with sherds and other objects from other age periods. Archaeologist often refer to pottery and other finds as coming from a sealed locus. This means that some feature like a floor or ash layer seals the finds below it making it unlikely that they are contaminated by later material from above. Making sure that finds are not contaminated requires careful excavation. Well, what about that ancient person who owned even more ancient family heirlooms or antiques? Yes, this can, on rare occasion, be a problem. Perhaps I'll post on how finds can potentially get mixed up and how careful excavation and analysis can avoid it.
Is there a way that a single potsherd can be dated directly? Yes, luminescence dating among other methods can sometimes be used but these methods generally have very large error windows and depend on a set of estimates concerning a variety of factors that are very hard to control in a real archaeological setting. Again, this and other archaeometric methods might make a good post. For instance, neutron activation can be used to determine the place of manufacture of a pot or sherd.
So could the "Iron I Age" lamp in the study collection really be from the latest part of the Late Bronze Age? Sure, but unlikely. The Iron I Age lasted about 250 years, the period of overlap in usage at the end of the Late Bronze Age is usually thought to be about 50 years. So crudely, there is only about a 17% likelihood that it is from the last few decades of the Late Bronze Age. Other factors, like population distribution, and the distribution of tombs where whole pottery might be preserved makes the likelihood much lower than that. However, if this "Iron I Age" lamp were found in the same archaeological context as the Late Bronze Age example, then the odds that they were both from the last few decades of the Late Bronze age go up immensely. In archeology, context is everything and the lamps in the study collection are out of context.
Reference:
Posted by Duane Smith at September 1, 2006 2:58 PM | Read more on Archaeology |
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