CERAMICS FROM THE ETRUSCAN SETTLEMENT OF POGGIO COLLA IN TUSCANY: A CHEMICAL CHARACTERIZATION AND PROVENANCE STUDY

What can an ancient piece of pottery tell an archaeologist? Actually, it can reveal much information, and not just about the technological and artistic skills and world views of the society in which it was produced. Provenance studies of ceramics can provide information on ancient humans' cultural and economic interactions that may be otherwise unavailable in the material archaeological record. Chemical fingerprints are commonly used in archaeometric investigations to determine the provenance of ceramic materials, obsidians, stone, various ore minerals, and more.

This study details the chemical characterization of 69 locally-produced ceramic sherds excavated from the Podere Funghi site at the Poggio Colla Field School in Vicchio, Italy. The goal of the chemical characterization is to assess the potential of defining a chemical fingerprint for the locally-produced ceramics for use in future provenance studies. The major elemental compositions (Si, Ti, Al, Fe, Mn, Mg, Ca, Na, K, and P) and 4 trace (Sr, Zr, V, Cr) elemental compositions of the 69 ceramic sherds have been determined by X-ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy. The data have been analyzed graphically and with multivariate statistics and compared to published results to assess the chemical distinctness of the local ceramics. The results of this initial investigation suggest that the locally-produced Podere Funghi midden ceramic material has a distinct range of chemical composition. This means that it may be possible to confidently assign a pottery sherd to the local production sites at Poggio Colla based on its chemistry. Although the results are promising, further analysis and trace elemental composition determination is required to test the distinctness of the Podere Funghi ceramic chemistry.

The chemistry of the 69 Podere Funghi midden ceramics has also been compared to the chemical data of 21 Bucchero fragments from the Poggio Colla excavations (C. Vaden, unpublished data). The results are promising in that the chemistry of most of these Bucchero samples is quite similar to that of the Podere Funghi midden ceramics. Therefore, the Bucchero fragments are likely to have been made locally. However, a non-local production site with ceramic products of similar chemistry can not be currently ruled out with complete confidence.