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During the Roman period pottery was used in all aspects of life causing a correlation between assemblage, composition and site use. Of course, the state of the pottery collected from the surface is transformed by formation processes. Complex research strategies are formulated in order to work around this. This dissertation explores the theoretical perspectives of plough-soil assemblages and the correlation between artefact and use with the aim of suggesting a research strategy for hypothesising about the general activities taking place at different ancient rural sites identified by survey. The use typology is put forward as an analytical tool which allows us to study systematically the artefactual variability in the plough-soil assemblages related to activity differentiation. The method consists of seeking empirically generalised pottery indexes of different human activities by sorting the pottery according to a use typology and study the relative proportional distribution, the artefactual variability of the assemblage. The data used in the dissertation come from Late Roman Cyprus and the pottery indexes proposed here are chronologically, spatially, and culturally specific to this in a broader context; however the theory and methodology have cross-cultural relevance. Pottery indexes based on use typologies could be used to classify a greater variety of sites in survey archaeology in the future thereby revealing a more complete range of human behaviour across the ancient cultural, social, economic and ritual landscape. |
