Ceramic vessels as cooking pots : Use-wear analysis with experimental archaeological methods

Abstract

Surpassing mere typological description, pottery analyses have recently been increasingly engaged in evaluating the functional roles of vessels and reconstructing the nuanced ways they could have been used in the past. Therefore, it has become necessary to apply scientific methods and examine, specify, and sometimes re-interpret the current typological framework rooted in traditional denominations and morphological associations. This paper investigates the generic roles of cooking pots, taking, besides morphological characteristics, use-wear traces into account. The article presents a detailed description of the general methodology applied in a series of cooking experiments in 2022 and one of the open-air cooking methods. The goal of the experiments was to reconstruct and document the transformation pottery vessels undergo during cooking, including the characteristic traces of cooking-related changes induced by high temperatures and contact with fire.