Gunneweg, Jan, Perlman, I. and Asaro, F. 1988, (appeared in 1990), The Provenience, Typology and Chronology of Nabataean Painted Fine Ware Jahrbuch des Roemisches-Germanisches Museum Mainz, 35, 115-145
Nabataean Painted Fine Ware
For more than two decades, many archaeological problems have been solved with the aid of pottery provenance studies which were based on instrumental neutron activation analysis (hence INAA). If clay were imported, and was used, unaltered, to make pottery, we would have no way of knowing whether it was the clay or the pottery that was imported. If the potter happened to introduce some impurity which could be detected, we might have a clue of what had taken place. Nabataean Painted Fine Ware pottery from Israel and Jordan, as well as clays and claimed "unfired eastern sigillata-A" pottery and clay from the potter's workshop at Oboda from the Negev desert in Israel, were submitted to instrumental neutron activation analysis at both Jerusalem's Archaeometry Unit and at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory with the purpose of determining its origin. The conclusive evidence for the manufacture of the NABPF repertory at Petra is provided by chemical analysis. The INAA analyses showed that the chemical compositions of the pottery wasters from the Petra kiln fitted with NABPF pottery according to statistics. Since ceramic wasters are among the best materials giving the chemical composition of clay used to make local pottery, it follows that NABPF pottery was locally-made at Petra. We further discovered that the Oboda kiln was used for the making of plain jugs and cooking ware from local Oboda clay. The vessels found within the kiln were probably from the Byzantine period. That so much other earlier pottery of sigillata was found within the kiln is explained by the fact that the kiln stood on a layer of rejected and discarded pottery as is seen in the nearby preserved bulk.
The pomegranate, a often used item in Nabataean pottery
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Jan Gunneweg Ph.D., The Hebrew University, revised November 2005
