The Distribution of Chiot Pottery

Abstract

Distribution maps are fashionable among archaeologists, but they are not always used properly. It is not enough to mark the places where objects of a given class have been found; it is important to know also in what frequency they were found, where they have not been found, and where they have not been looked for. To collect this information is often difficult and sometimes impossible since so much excavation has gone unrecorded, and I have therefore chosen one of the easier subjects, the distribution of Chiot pottery in the late seventh and early sixth centuries B.C. Much Chiot pottery is fortunately distinctive, so that even the more conscienceless excavators have often identified it and thought it worth mention, and thus we have fuller data for its distribution than for that of most classes of archaic Greek pottery.