Provenance identification of ancient pottery from Hachijojima Island, part of Izu Islands (Tokyo, Japan), using X‐ray fluorescence spectrometry

Abstract

AbstractA total of 47 pottery fragments were unearthed in Hachijojima Island, part of the Izu Islands (Tokyo, Japan). Among these samples, 36 found in the Kurawa site had designs resembling pottery dating back to the Jomon period (14,000–300 BC) distributed throughout Japan's main island, Honshu; five samples from the Jomon period found in the Yubama site were “undesigned”; the rest, found in the Yaene site, were undesigned Haji pottery samples dating back to the beginning of the late Kofun period (490–549 AD). X‐ray fluorescence spectrometry (XRF) was used to determine the chemical composition (in terms of 10 major oxides and 12 minor elements) of the samples to identify their provenance, that is, local versus nonlocal. For this purpose, a portion of each pottery fragment was processed to obtain a glass bead specimen. The pottery samples were classified by multivariate statistical approaches, including principal component analysis and cluster analysis, on the basis of their chemical composition. Additionally, the XRF results were compared to geochemical data from Hachijojima Island using scatter diagrams. The data thus collected allowed the provenance of the pottery samples to be inferred. In particular, the 36 samples from the Kurawa site were concluded to have been brought to Hachijojima Island from Honshu in prehistoric times, whereas the other samples were concluded to have been manufactured locally.