Arqueoestatística aplicada ao estudo composicional de cerâmicas arqueológicas

Abstract

Chemical studies of the ceramics are based on the assumption that ceramic produced from a specific clay will show a similar chemical composition and that its composition will be distinguished from that of ceramics produced from a different clay. It is common to determine the chemical composition of ceramic using techniques such as neutron activation analysis, inductively coupled plasma spectroscopy, x-ray fluorescence analysis. In this work 74 ceramics fragments and 1 clay from three archaeological sites (São José 26, Saco da Onça 24 and Curituba: 24) located in the Brazilian Northeast were analyzed using INAA to determine the concentration of 24 chemical elements. The results were interpreted by mean of Archaeostatistics techniques, such as Linear Discriminant Analysis and principal components, which was utilized to facilitate identification of compositional groups. The Mahalanobis distance was applied for detecting outliers and Wilks’s lambda provided the critical values. It was obtained that samples from São José and Curituba are constitute of ceramic pastes different, while samples from Saco da Onça Site overlap the pottery samples from São José and Curituba Sites.