Abstract

Pottery studies have long taken up a fundamental role in archaeology. For many areas and time periods it remains our main foundation for (relative) dating, as well as functional assessment of archaeological contexts, understanding technology, fashion, and diet, networks of interaction and exchange, social practices, and resource exploitation strategies. Traditional pottery studies often focus on the establishment of two main axes of structuration: 1) typology; and 2) chronology, often pursued in combination as typo-chronological frameworks. For this purpose, endless heaps of material are amassed, described and compiled in voluminous catalogues. The immense merits of these traditional approaches for the development of reliable frameworks of interpretation as the foundation of archaeological reasoning cannot be overstated.

The recent upsurge in computational approaches in archaeology offers researchers new opportunities to identify, model, and interpret complex patterns in the production, distribution, and usage of pottery. In this presentation, we will introduce a digital pipeline consisting of shape quantification, robustness and association analysis, and network mapping. We apply this pipeline to a case study of Iron Age to Hellenistic (800-50 BCE) pottery material from excavations at Sagalassos and Düzen Tepe, as well as survey material collected from sites in the surrounding micro-region. Through a dual application of the pipeline on two interpretative levels – i.e. functional groups and type-variety – we aim to explore complex data patterns to establish and refine typo-chronologies and identify potential communities of practice within the micro-region. We will demonstrate how such a workflow can be incorporated in an iterative exploration through interactions between ceramicist and data scientist. The end goal of this approach is to develop a methodological framework where archaeological and computational approaches mutually reinforce each other through their respective strengths of rich interpretability and analytical tractability.