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The early Bronze Age sites, Goltepe and Kestel in Anatolia (Turkey), have been surveyed and excavated by Aslihan Yener of the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago. The main objective of this work is to elucidate the practices involved in the earliest known tin mining and metal processing in the Near East.
Five classes of Bronze Age pottery, including four domestic wares and a group of "industrial" crucible refractories, were thought to be of local origin. This assumption was tested by neutron activation analysis (NAA). The research questions were: What is the relationship between the groups of pottery - how many ceramic traditions are represented? What was/were the specific source(s) of these wares?
The NAA results indicated that the Micaceous ware and Burnished ware are geochemically related and were probably manufactured with the same clays that were used for the production of the crucibles. The chemistry of these three ceramic classes are similar to the chemical composition of locally gathered alluvial clays that were also tested by NAA. Metallic ware clearly represents a unique source group. Its high values for metals (e.g., Fe, Ni, Co, Cr, As, and Sb) suggests a likely source in the vicinity of the Anatolian mining region. The nature of Fine-slipped ware is more ambiguous. Further testing is necessary to determine whether the pottery derived from a unique source or was a "diluted/enriched" variant of the "alluvial clay" group, and to identify and compare the quantities of silicon in the samples using SEM/EDS.
De Sena, E. C. & Friedman, E. S. (1997). An Investigation of the Sources of Bronze Age Pottery from Goltepe and Kestel, Turkey by Neutron Activation. In (P.B. Vandiver, Ed) Materials Issues in Art and Archaeology, V. Philadelphia, PA: Materials Research Society.
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