Abstract
The ceramics and pigments of Late Bronze Age (LBA) painted Canaanite pottery were studied using ceramic petrography and three microbeam methods: pXRF, LA-ICP-MS and EPMA. The analyses focused on specimens from Tel Esur in Israel's northeastern Sharon Plain, which has yielded a well-preserved assemblage of the 15th/14th centuries BCE. We studied painted jars, biconical jugs and a bowl decorated with black, red or two-colored geometric patterns. The petrographic analysis revealed that the majority of the painted vessels were produced on the southern Levantine coastal plain. The microbeam analyses demonstrated the use of ferromanganese and ferric-iron pigments for the black and the red decorations respectively. The adoption of the manganese-based technique in Canaanite workshops seems to be an early LBA technological progress, which facilitated the production of black decoration while firing vessels in an oxidizing atmosphere; it explains the sharp increase in the production of two-colored Canaanite pottery during that period. Ferromanganese ore sources for the black pigment are rare in Canaan and absent from its coast; this required importation of raw ore from external sources. The analogous use of the manganese-based technique for black decoration on Cypriot wares suggests that both pigments and technology were transferred from Cyprus to Canaan, highlighting a ‘new’ aspect in the multi-faceted Cypro-Canaanite liaisons of this period.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Article number | 102212 |
| Journal | Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports |
| Volume | 30 |
| DOIs | |
| State | Published - Apr 2020 |
Bibliographical note
Funding Information:The present study was conducted within the framework of Golan Shalvi's MA Thesis at the Department of Archaeology, University of Haifa. This study is an integral part of a wider, comprehensive research of paint-decorated Bronze and Iron Age pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 209/14, awarded to Gilboa and Shoval) and the Research Funds of the Open University of Israel, Israel (grants nos. 37179 and 31016, awarded to Shoval). We gratefully acknowledge these grants. Part of this work was done while Shoval was a visiting scientist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU). He expresses his appreciation for Oded Navon (HU) for his collaboration. Ayelet Gilboa was visiting professor at the Archaeology and Anthropology Department, University of Bristol and conveys her gratitude to the department and especially to Tamar Hodos for very fruitful discussions. The LA-ICP-MS, EPMA and pXRF analyses were conducted at the HU Institute of Earth Sciences facilities. The authors are grateful to Omri Dvir (HU) and Yael Levenson (HU) for operating the EPMA and the LA-ICP-MS laboratories and performing the analyses as well as for helpful discussions. We thank Yigal Erel (HU) for the permission to use the XRF apparatus. We are indebted to Sariel Shalev and Paula Waiman-Barak (University of Haifa) for letting us use the optical mineralogy laboratory at this university. We thank Dana Harari for assistance and Sapir Haad for illustrating the ceramics. Finally, we acknowledge the contributions of three reviewers to the comprehensiveness of this paper.
Funding Information:
The present study was conducted within the framework of Golan Shalvi’s MA Thesis at the Department of Archaeology, University of Haifa. This study is an integral part of a wider, comprehensive research of paint-decorated Bronze and Iron Age pottery in the Eastern Mediterranean partly supported by the Israel Science Foundation (grant no. 209/14 , awarded to Gilboa and Shoval) and the Research Funds of the Open University of Israel , Israel (grants nos. 37179 and 31016 , awarded to Shoval). We gratefully acknowledge these grants. Part of this work was done while Shoval was a visiting scientist at the Institute of Earth Sciences at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (HU). He expresses his appreciation for Oded Navon (HU) for his collaboration. Ayelet Gilboa was visiting professor at the Archaeology and Anthropology Department, University of Bristol and conveys her gratitude to the department and especially to Tamar Hodos for very fruitful discussions. The LA-ICP-MS, EPMA and pXRF analyses were conducted at the HU Institute of Earth Sciences facilities. The authors are grateful to Omri Dvir (HU) and Yael Levenson (HU) for operating the EPMA and the LA-ICP-MS laboratories and performing the analyses as well as for helpful discussions. We thank Yigal Erel (HU) for the permission to use the XRF apparatus. We are indebted to Sariel Shalev and Paula Waiman-Barak (University of Haifa) for letting us use the optical mineralogy laboratory at this university. We thank Dana Harari for assistance and Sapir Haad for illustrating the ceramics. Finally, we acknowledge the contributions of three reviewers to the comprehensiveness of this paper.
Publisher Copyright:
© 2020 Elsevier Ltd
Keywords
- Black and red decorations
- Ceramic and pigment analyses
- Cypro-Canaanite liaisons
- Iron and manganese ores
- Technology transfer
- Trade in pigments
- pXRF, LA-ICP-MS and EPMA