Losing your temper: the effect of mineral inclusions on pottery analyses

Pottery from Buka Island, Papua New Guinea, was subjected to chemical characterisation studies using both the electron microprobe and PIXE‐PIGME. I report here on the problems and limits of using chemical analyses on prehistoric pottery to assess questions concerning technology and production patterns, and address in particular the problem of compensating for the chemical noise that arises when mineral inclusions are added to a clay in the manufacturing process of pottery. This chemical noise, if not taken into account, can lead to erroneous models of production and exchange. The results demonstrate that the electron microprobe is a useful tool in overcoming the problem of chemical noise and when used in conjunction with PIXE‐PIGME can also be useful in identifying whether inclusions found in a sherd were manually added or found naturally in the original clay. This allows archaeologists another dimension to identify technological changes between assemblages.