Solomon, Scripture, and Science: The Rise of the Judahite State in the 10th Century BCE

This paper compares evidence from stratified sites that are well dated by radiocarbon analyses, ceramic typology, and a critical reading of the pertinent texts of the Hebrew Bible. The results show that by the 10th century BCE in Judah we have a polity that represents a centralized state or kingdom. It was likely ruled by Solomon, even if the “larger-than-life” portrait of the Bible is exaggerated.

Emergence and Development of Pottery in the Andean Early Formative Period: New Insights from an Improved Wairajirca Pottery Chronology at the Jancao Site in the Huánuco Region, Peru

This article presents a high-resolution chronology of Wairajirca pottery in the Huánuco basin, which has been identified as a frontier region between the Andean highlands and the Amazonian rain forests: its pottery is known for having mixed features from both areas. However, the lack of fine-grained pottery and radiocarbon datasets has handicapped comparative studies’ attempts to track in detail its early development process. Our new high-resolution chronology of Wairajirca pottery is based on stratigraphic excavation data, a detailed ceramic typology, and a Bayesian analysis of the radiocarbon date from the Jancao site. The five-staged ceramic sequence from the late eighteenth to late twelfth century cal BC displays specific features of this development, including radical changes in vessel type over several centuries and connections with other pottery traditions. The earliest phase shows close relation with highlands traditions, whereas the influence of tropical rain forest patterns intensified in later phases alongside the continuation of local pottery traditions. This indicates that frontier dynamics based on fluid interactions across different ecological zones and regional sociopolitical movements played a crucial role in this long-term social process.

A Diachronic Perspective on the Prehispanic Ceramic Tradition of the Valley of Oaxaca

For the prehispanic Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico), including Monte Albán and other sites, the 1967 volume by Alfonso Caso, Ignacio Bernal, and Jorge Acosta has long served as the key guide and reference for ceramic typology and chronology. Although this classic archaeological tome remains the essential source, nevertheless five decades of fieldwork and analysis has led to important temporal expansions in the pottery record as well as refinements, new observations on pottery production, and the extension of relevant research issues, which all enhance the original schema of Caso and his colleagues. This chapter synthesizes and cites many of these new ceramic developments as a basis to take stock of what we have learned during the intervening years and to establish a foundation to investigate shifts in the region’s ceramic complex over three prehispanic millennia.

AMS 14C Dating of Materials Recovered from the Tunnel under the Temple of the Feathered Serpent in Teotihuacan, Mexico

In 2003, flooding occurred in the Ciudadela (Citadel) of Teotihuacan and saltpeter began to damage the Temple of the Feathered Serpent. Work done to solve this problem led to one of the most important archaeological discoveries made in this site in recent years: an intact tunnel sealed for more than a thousand years. The project created to study the tunnel was named Tlalocan or Path to the Underworld. More than 60,000 objects have been recovered after years of exploration and removing huge amounts of soil and stones. This paper presents the first results of accelerator mass spectrometry (AMS) radiocarbon dating performed on some of those materials recovered from the tunnel. With these findings, in combination with the archaeological data, based on stratigraphy and ceramic typology, a chronology of several events is proposed concerning the construction phases and ceremonial use, as well as partial and definitive closures of the tunnel. Every closure was accompanied by a deliberate and structured deposition of offerings and ritual refuse along the tunnel. The range of ages that covers the Bayesian calibration of samples collected along the tunnel is around 115 yr, from AD 125 to 240. Material collected at the surface of the chamber located at the end of the tunnel and under the pyramid gave ages in the interval between AD 400 and 534. All samples analyzed fall within the interval of time that covers the period of occupation of Teotihuacan.

Formal Typology of Iberian Ceramic Vessels by Morphometric Analysis

In this chapter a formal typology of Iberian vessels is proposed. The ceramic material comes from different archaeological settlements located in the provinces of Jaén, Granada, and Córdoba (Andalusia, Spain) and date to Iberian period. The corpus is composed of 1,133 complete ceramic vessels. First, we define the criteria for the construction of a ceramic typology and then the similarities in the ceramic profiles are measured following morphometric criteria. The morphometric method we used to characterize and classify this wheel-made pottery according to its profile is Mathematical Morphology. Each piece is represented as a vector, obtained by sampling the so-called morphological curves (erosion, dilation, opening, and closing), and Euclidean distance is used as a measure of similarity.