Characterization and provenance of ceramic artifacts and local clays from Late Mycenaean Kastrouli (Greece) by means of p-XRF screening and statistical analysis

Abstract

Abstract A ceramic assemblage selected from a recently excavated Late Helladic settlement at Kastrouli (Central Greece) has been chemically analyzed and statistically elaborated, to add new information and contribution to the Mycenaean culture in the wider studied area. The chemical composition of 142 ceramic sherds represented by wide range of household typologies was measured by using a calibrated non-destructive portable X-ray fluorescence (XRF) set-up. Fired briquettes prepared from 8 local clay sources and several mixtures of them were similarly analyzed. A robust statistical analysis is applied based on 15 major and minor/trace elements employing hierarchical cluster analysis with several linkages, descriptive statistics, biplots and boxplots, principal component analysis (PCA), as well as, Euclidean and Mahalanobis distances on standardized ratio transformed data. The chemical characterization and the statistical evaluation were coupled by petrographic analysis. The results obtained revealed that some local clay sources and their mixtures are placed within the archaeologically identified broad ceramics group, providing, thus, evidence for a local production of the studied pottery, and artisan's skills employed a variety of manufacture technologies.