Data from “Ceramic Technology and Cultural Change in Sicily from the 6th to the 11th Century AD.” PhD Thesis

Abstract

This dataset presents the results of the petrographic and SEM-EDS analysis of 516 ceramic artefacts sampled from four early medieval sites across Sicily. The full database archive as well as the raw data are stored in the University of Sheffield repository. Petrographic descriptions can be found in Testolini’s thesis from page 94 to 142. These data shed new light into the ceramic provenance and technological choices in Sicily in a time of shifting power between Byzantine and Islamic rulers. The Dataset can be reused to identify other ceramic production centres and technological traditions in Sicily across time and space, as well as to challenge cultural labelling of ceramic artefacts.

Keywords

• archaeological science
• early medieval sicily
• ceramic petrography
• sem-eds
• islamic archaeology
• byzantine archaeology
• cooking pots
• glazed ceramic
• decolonising archaeology