What is it about?
Things that look alike are not always the same and to tell them apart we need to find a quality that differentiates them. In this case the 'things that look alike' are tiny pieces of stone that Cypriot potters were adding to their clay paste about 3000 years ago. This particular stone, called mudstone, could be coming from two different places on the island of Cyprus and using the methodology described in this paper we can determine where from.
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Why is it important?
Archaeologists need to know exactly what materials ancient craftsmen were using in order to understand their practices, their way of work. It's like trying to trace where the materials used to make your smartphone came from, to see if they were fair-trade or not. In this particular case, determining where the mudstones in the pots came from helps link communities of potters to specific resources in their environment.
Perspectives
There is a specific kitchen tool used to remove the seeds from bell-peppers. You could do a similar job with a knife and the tool doesn't work on pretty much anything else. But still in the particular context of bell-peppers it does the best job. This is the trick with the methodology I present here. It's not universal, you need to find the right questions to apply it to. But if you do, it works better than anything else.
Christina Makarona
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Leave no mudstone unturned: Geochemical proxies for provenancing mudstone temper sources in South-Western Cyprus, Journal of Archaeological Science Reports, June 2016, Elsevier,
DOI: 10.1016/j.jasrep.2015.08.012.
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