20
Lithic vs. ceramic analysis - which tells the better story for a site?
I was sorting through a dig from a small Mississippian site in Tennessee last fall, and we had to decide whether to focus our limited grant money on analyzing the stone tools or the pottery sherds. I pushed for the pottery route because I figured the decorations would date things better, but honestly the lithics ended up giving us way more info on trade routes. The ceramics were all pretty standard for the region, nothing wild. Has anyone else had one category of artifacts totally outshine the other on a project?
4 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In4 Comments
tara64226d ago
Gotta disagree here. I've worked a few Mississippian sites in Georgia and the pottery always tells a better story. The temper types and surface treatments let you track migration patterns way more precisely than lithics. On one project the ceramics showed three distinct occupation phases while the lithics just looked like the same basic toolkit the whole time.
4
jasonallen26d ago
Buddy of mine had a dig in Alabama where the lithics straight up rewrote their whole regional timeline.
2
violar3526d ago
Tara642 is right that pottery can track migration patterns but that lithics rewrote a timeline thing in Alabama is exactly what happened on a site I worked in Missouri. We had these big triangular points that everyone assumed were late woodland, but the context with carbon dating said nope, early mississippian. The pottery was just the same old shell tempered stuff we see everywhere, nothing to write home about. So yeah, sometimes the rocks just blow the pots out of the water.
2