‘Seeing Shit’: Assessing the Visibility of Dung Tempering in Ancient Pottery Using an Experimental Approach

ABSTRACT

Widespread ethnographic evidence exists for the addition of animal dung to clay during the process of ceramic production. However, conclusive evidence of dung tempering in archaeological ceramics is relatively rare. The aim of this study is to ascertain whether, and under which conditions, dung tempering of pottery is identifiable. To answer these questions, we assessed whether a combination of micro-particle analysis in loose sediment and thin-section petrography can reveal the addition of dung to the clay paste by focusing on faecal spherulites, ash pseudomorphs, phytoliths and coprophilous fungal spores. We analysed several series of experimentally produced ceramic briquettes tempered with different types of dung and dung ash, which were fired at a range of increasing temperatures. Our study shows that the identification of dung tempering represents a challenge, and it depends on a number of different factors, among others the original presence of dung markers in the dung used, the manufacturing process, the firing temperatures and the firing atmosphere. Overall, through a multidisciplinary approach, our work clarifies a variety of issues connected to the identification of dung in ancient pottery, highlighting the role of faecal spherulites as the most promising proxy.

KEYWORDS:

• Dung tempering
• pottery technology
• experimental archaeology‌
• ceramic petrography‌
• faecal spherulites
• dung fungal spores
• phytoliths

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Christoph Berthold, Beatrice Boese, Marco Cocuccioni, Aspen Cooper, Jörg Fischer, Carlotta Gardner, Lars Heinze, Eirini Koutouvaki, Rosi Manthey, Arvin Raj Mathur, Marco Müller, Hannes Napierala, Klaus Nickel, Lars-Ole Schmutz, Martin Rogier, Johannes Seidler for their help and useful feedback.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Author’s Contribution

Silvia Amicone: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis (petrography), Investigation, Resources, Writing – original draft, Review and Editing, Visualisation (Figures 4–7), Project administration, Funding acquisition.

Lionello F. Morandi: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis (dung fungal spores), Investigation, Writing – original draft; Review and Editing, Visualisation (Figures 1 and 3, Table 3).

Shira Gur-Arieh: Conceptualisation, Methodology, Formal analysis (micro-remains analyses), Investigation, Writing – original draft; Review and Editing, Visualisation (Figure 2, Tables 1 and 2), Funding acquisition.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Excellence Initiative of the Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen and the Ministry for Science, Research, and Art of Baden-Württemberg. SGA’s work has been funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie H2020-MSCA-IF-2017, grant agreement number 794823, MapDung project.

Notes on contributors

S. Amicone

Silvia Amicone is a Research Scientist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, within the Competence Centre Archaeometry – Baden-Wuerttemberg (CCA-BW), and an Honorary Research Associate at University College London, Institute of Archaeology. She completed an AHRC funded PhD at the University College London. As a pottery analyst specialising in pottery technology in contexts of intense socio-cultural innovation, Silvia Amicone has contributed to several projects in the Balkans and the Mediterranean area and is an active member of the Ceramic Technology Research Network at the Institute of Archaeology (University College London).

L. F. Morandi

Lionello F. Morandi holds a Doctorate from the University of Reading and is currently Honorary Research Associate at the Competence Center – Archaeometry Baden-Wuerttemberg (CCA-BW). His research interests are wide, and he is actively involved in a number of projects ranging from Early Iron Age Mediterranean to ethnoarchaeology, bioarchaeology and palaeolimnology.

S. Gur-Arieh

Shira Gur-Arieh is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at CaSEs Research Group in Pompeu Fabra University, Spain. She is interested in human-environment interaction, and especially how environmental conditions dictate human techno-cultural behavior and how in turn this behavior impacts the environment. Her research focus on plant and animal product utilisation for food, fuel, and construction, which she explores using experimental archaeology, ethnoarchaeology, and a variety of geoarchaeological techniques including phytolith analysis, FTIR spectroscopy, and micromorphology.