Vessel Lot as an Analytic Unit and the Evaluation of Its Efficiency－A Case study on the Pottery from She-Kou Site and its Standardization
Date Issued
2007
Date
2007
Author(s)
Chen, Pei-yu
DOI
zh-TW
Abstract
In this thesis, I would like to answer two questions: 1) Can vessel lot be correctly constructed by attribute analysis? 2) Will it be more efficient to take the vessel lot rather than the sherd as a unit to discuss archeological topics? I take the She-Kou site as an example to answer these two questions.
In archaeological studies, “vessel lot” and “sherd” both refer to the idea of pottery. Although the broken pottery is often excavated from archaeological sites in the form of sherd, in the real world, the unit that people cognize and use is “vessel lot” rather than “sherd”, and some attributes such as typology, diameter and height will also miss if we use sherd as an analytic unit. Being aware of this shortcoming, Chilton (1994) started to advocate taking vessel lot as an analytic unit to deal with archaeological subjects, She believes that we can integrate sherds into vessel lot by using attribute analysis. Although Chilton emphasizes the concept of vessel lot, we still need to consider its feasibility. Only when my two questions lead to positive conclusions can the concept of using vessel lot unit be applied into the research of other regions or archaeological sites.
To answer the first question, I take the pottery materials from She-kou site to do some ceramic analysis. First, I use sherd data collected from restored vessel to run cluster analysis, and then try to find out which attributes are relatively important when we try to construct a vessel lot. After that, I use those attributes to run cluster analysis with all the scattered sherds. This analysis leads me to construct 22 different vessel lots. At last, I check sherd samples in each vessel lot. By the statistics tests and directly observation, I may conclude that with the appropriate attribute, vessel lot can be constructed by cluster analysis.
As for the second question, I take standardization as an example to examine if it would lead to any difference by using “sherd” and “vessel” unit. In this part, I detect that both sherd and vessel lot reveal a trend that in the She-kou site, the group of tempered pottery is more homogeneous than the group of non-tempered pottery. Nevertheless, when we use sherd as a unit, this trend is hardly shown in the statistic test. On the contrary, if we use vessel lot as an analytic unit, this trend can be displayed clearly. The statistic test also confirms this result. In this case, I evaluate the efficiency of vessel lot unit, and the result is good enough to encourage the use of vessel lot as an analytic unit in archaeological study.
Subjects
陶容器單位
陶器分析
屬性分析
集群分析
標準化
社口遺址
vessel lot
ceramic analysis
attribute analysis
cluster analysis
standardization
She-kou Site
Type
other
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