Technology and organization of black pottery production on the north coast of Peru
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Not all «black» pottery was produced in the same manner just as their social and symbolic uses and reasons for production varied a good deal. Nor are many examples truly black. The Middle Sicán culture (AD 900-1100) on the north coast of Peru distinguished itself with the perfection and large-scale production of black pottery made of fine paste. Based on our «holistic» study of a Middle Sicán workshop (including experimental firing and detailed chemical analyses of both archaeological and experimental samples), we present a detailed characterization of the blackware production technology and organization. Our study revealed that the glossy Middle Sicán blackware resulted from various factors including firing under strongly reducing conditions in small semi-closed kilns, an even carbon deposition on the vessel surface as well as penetration into the body, and the formation of graphite crystals on the well-burnished surface. Chimú reduced ware, in contrast, is typically made of coarser pastes, not as well burnished, and fired in relatively large “pit kilns” that did not permit a tight control over temperature and atmosphere. We infer that the prestige of the Middle Sicán religion and its art together with the lustrous, truly black appearance of the pottery that had been rarely achieved before played an important role in establishing the popularity of black pottery not only in the Sicán heartland but also much of the coastal Peru.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".