Geochemical Characterizations of Early Ceramics in the Aucilla Watershed

Excavations at the Page-Ladson site in the Aucilla River Basin in NW Florida have recovered a variety of artifacts, including a collection of some of the earliest ceramics in the Americas, dating between 3500 and 1500 years ago. The dataset chronologically brackets a transition from more mobile hunting and gathering subsistence strategies toward sedentary, potentially food-producing societies. This project is the first ceramic-focused study conducted in the Aucilla Watershed with the purpose of determining whether the recovered ceramics are made using locally-sourced clays and whether the clays used correspond to different functional types of pottery vessels. Geochemical characterization was conducted using X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy on a sample set of 101 ceramic sherds. For each measurement, 40 kV of energy was applied for 60 seconds to the exposed surfaces of each sample (interior, exterior, and naturally broken edge) and the internal clay body upon breaking a small edge of each sherd. The results of the characterization analyses have demonstrated three distinct groupings based on the concentrations of rubidium within the ceramic samples; these groupings correspond to clays sourced from multiple locations and likely prepared using different clay recipes. The findings of this study represent ceramics produced at the household-level through which the technical knowledge of pot-making appears to be passed down generation-to-generation. This reflects the results of similar studies conducted at other sites throughout southeastern North America.