Methodological Issues in the Provenance Investigation of Early Formative Mesoamerican Ceramics

Abstract

A recent study of Early Formative Mesoamerican pottery by instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) yielded surprising results that prompted two critiques in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. The INAA study indicated that the Olmec center of San Lorenzo was a major exporter of carved-incised and white pottery and that little if any pottery made elsewhere was consumed at San Lorenzo. The critiques purport to "overturn" the INAA study and demonstrate a more balanced exchange of pottery among Early Formative centers. However, the critiques rely on a series of mistaken claims and misunderstandings that are addressed here. New petrographic data on a small sample of Early Formative pottery (Stoltman et al. 2005) are potentially useful, but they do not overturn INAA of nearly 1000 pottery samples and hundreds of raw material samples.

Investigating the production provenance of iron artifacts with multivariate methods

“…The strategy developed and tested in this paper is an attempt to adapt multivariate tools routinely used in ceramic provenance studies (e.g., Glascock, 1992;Neff et al, 2006) to the problem of sourcing iron artifacts. Focus is placed on exploiting the chemical signatures maintained between bloomery slag and artifact SIs to test provenance hypotheses.…”

Groundmass microsampling using laser ablation time-of-flight inductively coupled plasma mass spectrometry (LA–TOF–ICP–MS): potential for rhyolite provenance research

“…This 'stretchability' problem is caused by the tendency of individual specimens to stretch the groups' shapes in hyperspace so as to include themselves (Harbottle, 1976). Such groups also have a greater probability to reform and to include divergent points from other groups, because of the difference in size and shape of the 'group' that a single point can make (Neff et al, 2006). Another means of counteracting the stretchability effect is to subdivide known groups into smaller groups.…”

Materialism, Mode of Production, and a Millennium of Change in Southern Mexico

“…However, neither the initial domestication nor the subsequent spread of early maize transformed the Mesoamerican society in any marked way. The Late Archaic residents of the Soconusco used a combination of estuary resources and cultivated maize more intensively, leaving evidence in the pollen record (Neff et al 2006a). During the second millennium B.C., estuary resources along with maize (and a number of other domesticated plants) were used by politically ambitious individuals (Clark and Blake 1994;Clark and Gosser 1995).…”