In further celebration of Pot Week, here’s a mid-Pacific pot study.
“Among Polynesia’s First Pots,” David V. Burley and William R. Dickinson, Journal of Archaeological Science, Volume 37, Issue 5, May 2010, Pages 1020-1026. (Thanks to investigator Tom Gill for bringing this to our attention.) The authors,at Simon Fraser University and at the University of Arizona, report:
“X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy and petrographic thin section microscopy are applied to a sample of anomalous appearing Lapita pottery sherds from Nukuleka, the earliest archaeological site in Polynesia. Both analyses indicate non-local origins for the ceramic vessels, suggesting they were brought on founding canoes. Mineral inclusions in ceramic tempers eliminate sources to the west of Tonga in eastern Melanesia; rather the temper source is most probably a dacitic high island from a distant island arc of central Melanesia.”