Provenance of clay material used in the manufacture of archaeological pottery from Cyprus

Abstract

Multivariate statistical analysis of a total of 29 macro, trace and rare earth elements by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) on 129 pottery specimens from southwestern Cyprus obtained from 38 archaeological sites, ranging in age from the Neolithic through to Roman, has indicated that the large majority of the ceramics had been manufactured locally. X-ray diffraction analysis of a set of clay-rich deposits which may have served as raw materials in the manufacture of the archaeological ceramics shows a complex clay mineral suite comprising variable amounts of chrysotile, kaolinite, hydrous mica, smectite, chlorite, interlayered vermiculite, and vermiculite, together with non-phyllosilicates such as quartz and carbonates. Discriminant function analysis of compositional data obtained by INAA for a representative set of readily accessible and locally derived clay samples, and using two discriminant functions which had previously accounted for all the between-group variance within the archaeological ceramic set, identified those clay types most probably used in the manufacture of the ceramics. In addition, the analysis also identified local clay materials from southwestern Cyprus which were compositionally dissimilar from the archaeological ceramics and which were probably never used in the manufacturing process. The results reveal that, in the selection of raw materials to be used in the manufacture of the archaeological ceramics, preference was given to clays from very local alluvial and colluvial deposits.