Gunneweg, Jan and Yellin, J. 1997, The Origin of some Plain Ware pottery from Tel Anafa, in Tel Anafa II,i The Hellenistic and Roman pottery (S.C. Herbert, Ed.) Ann Arbor MI, pp. 236-242 Four chemical compositions of Hellenistic and Roman Plain Wares were established instead of the 6 types that stylistically were classified by the archaeologists. The gist of this instrumental neutron activation study points to an import of Hellenistic and Roman pottery into Tel Anafa from the northern coast of Israel (or Lebanon) as well as from the Golan Heights in general and from Kfar Hananya, Meiron and Gush Halav in particular. Anafa's Sigillata ware had already earlier been traced to Cyprus, that in contrary to what has been published by the archaeometry group of the university of Missouri that claims--without providing a REFERENCE group that is site specific --that the vessels came from Syria. The Missouri team based itself on the occurence of the sigillata pottery, assuming that where the pottery is most represented, it also must have been made there. This kind of reasoning is taking the information of the archaeologist as a fact and then prove with nuclear techniques that the archaeologist is right because the pottery to be analyzed analyses as the ceramics that the archaeologist provided them as locally made ware. Some sort of circular reasoning! Comments? Please write: Jan Gunneweg To return, click Archaeometry abstracts of our work or click "BACK" or click the Homepage . Jan Gunneweg Ph.D., The Hebrew University, revised November 2005