Morphometric analyses of Catalonian common greywares: some thoughts on typological classification of medieval and post-medieval pottery

Abstract

Cooking wares fired under reducing atmosphere are one of the most common archaeological findings in medieval contexts. These are coarse, irregular and mostly coil-built vessels finished on the wheel. The great homogeneity of these products, together with the high level of breakage and the massive amount of sherds found out in many contexts are the main difficulties to deal with in order to study them. In this paper results obtained from the morphometric analysis of traditional craft greyware pottery from Quart (Girona) and medieval greywares from the site of Santa Margarida (Martorell, Barcelona) are introduced. According to the obtained results in both cases, we demonstrate the methodological validity of including vessel’s profile measurement within a multivariate statistic exploitation of morphometric data. This exploitation allowed us to obtain precise classifications that take into account the degree of breakage and to establish comparable types.

Keywords

• tipología
• metodología
• estadística
• análisis vectorial
• arqueometría
• quart
• santa margarida