Israeli archaeologists launch project to trace origins of ancient pottery

The project, initiated by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), aims to trace the origins of thousands of ceramic vessels, even though the kilns in which they were fired have long been lost.

A new Israeli research initiative is using cutting-edge scientific methods to solve one of the following problems: archeology oldest mysteries: where ancient pottery was made. The project, initiated by the Israel Antiquities Authority (IAA), aims to trace the origins of thousands of ceramic vessels, even though the kilns in which they were fired have long been lost.

Thousands of pottery vessels unearthed at excavation sites across Israel were discovered by Dr. of the Israel Antiquities Authority, according to a recent announcement by the IAA. Anat Cohen Weinberger and Prof. from Tel Aviv University. It will now be examined and cataloged with advanced scientific methods within the scope of a joint project led by Alexander Fantalkin.

The study was designed to create a distinctive “fingerprint” for each ancient production kiln, based on the mineral and chemical composition of the pottery known to have been made there. Organizers said they envision a national database containing what they describe as the “genetic sequence” of kilns, which would allow researchers to make suggestions about the origin of a pottery vessel even when the kiln itself is not found at the excavation site.

Cohen Weinberger said in a statement that this absence was common.

“In most excavations we find large quantities of pottery, but we cannot find the kiln in which it was produced,” he said. Without the kiln, archaeologists have difficulty determining whether the vessels were made locally or brought from elsewhere, Cohen Weinberger said, noting that this gap is “one of the fundamental difficulties” in pottery research.

The IAA emphasized that determining a ship’s origin is not merely technical. He describes the resource as a key to the reconstruction of cultural and economic ties, trade networks, population movement, technological influence, and broader historical processes.

According to Cohen Weinberger, the first phase of the project focuses on pottery that can be connected to known kilns and analyzes them using two complementary scientific methods.

Methods for analyzing the origin of ancient pottery

One method is petrography, in which an ultra-thin ceramic slice of the vessel (about 30 microns thick) is examined under a polarizing microscope to identify minerals and rock fragments. The Antiquities Authority said the method could help correlate raw materials with the geological environment they came from, illuminating what it calls the potter’s “recipe.”

The second method is chemical analysis using neutron activation analysis or NAA. The IAA defined it as testing a small ceramic sample in a nuclear reactor to measure its elemental composition, including rare trace elements. The origin of the sample can then be suggested by comparing the results with pottery samples whose production sites are already known.

According to the IAA, the combined approach creates a unique profile for each kiln, which can then be used as a reference point for pottery found in “kiln-free” areas. In these cases, researchers will compare an unknown ship’s profile with the database and, if a match is found, suggest where the ship was built, even if it was discovered far from the production site, according to the announcement.

Many of the pottery vessels tested in past studies did not have a known production source because researchers did not have comparative data, and the resulting kiln profiles could help resolve this issue, Cohen Weinberger said in the announcement.

According to the statement, the research is being developed as a large-scale national project. As part of this, the IAA said it was creating a digital “bakery atlas” to consolidate accumulated knowledge and make it available to researchers through a platform developed by the authority’s digital technologies division. The statement states that the atlas is intended to serve as a long-term research infrastructure to examine past production, trade and regional connections.

Head of the Zinman Institute Petrography Laboratory at the University of Haifa, Dr. Mechael Osband told the Israeli Press Service that the project is promising. He is not associated with the IAA’s initiative.

“This is a unique project that has no analogues in other regions. It will provide the infrastructure for many studies dealing with different periods and will make a significant contribution to the understanding of economic and social connections in ancient times,” he told TPS-IL.