Monagrillo (3520–1300 cal BC) is Panama’s oldest pottery. Archaeologists assumed it was a low-fired expedient ware made with any available clay. We studied 1) clay sources (thin sections; DTA; shrinkage, porosity, and plasticity tests), 2) manufacturing techniques (xeroradiography; thin sections; visual inspection), and 3) firing temperature (SEM-EDS; porosity tests). We identified two clay typ...

During colonization in the 16th century both the Spanish and indigenous population underwent a dramatic cultural change. Puebla, Mexico is a unique city to discover the layers of identity because a different approach the Spanish decided to pursue to build its society. As Mexico’s first industrialized city, it is also the first Mexican city that was not built upon existing indigenous civilizatio...

AIM To study the actual exposure of pottery workers to silica particles, as their risk of silicosis is potentially high because of the presence of inhalable crystalline silica particles in the workplace. METHODS Nine pottery workers underwent bronchoalveolar lavage. The recovered fluid was analysed for cytological and mineralogical content by analytical transmission electron microscopy. The d...

Perhaps nowhere in European prehistory does the idea of clearly-defined cultural boundaries remain more current than in the initial Neolithic, where the southeast-northwest trend of the spread of farming crosses what is perceived as a sharp divide between the Balkans and central Europe. This corresponds to a distinction between the Vinča culture package, named for a classic site in Serbia, with...

Cultural change can be quantified by temporal changes in frequency of different cultural artefacts and it is a central question to identify what underlying cultural transmission processes could have caused the observed frequency changes. Observed changes, however, often describe the dynamics in samples of the population of artefacts, whereas transmission processes act on the whole population. H...

We describe the design and evaluation of a geometric interaction technique for bare-hand mid-air virtual pottery. We model the shaping of a pot as a gradual and progressive convergence of the potprofile to the shape of the user’s hand represented as a point-cloud (PCL). Our pottery-inspired application served as a platform for systematically revealing how users use their hands to express the in...

In an attempt to assess whether silica induces lung cancer, a nested case-control study of 316 male lung cancer cases and 1352 controls was carried out among pottery workers and tungsten, copper-iron, and tin miners from five provinces in south central China. Exposure to dust and silica for each study subject was evaluated quantitatively by cumulative exposure measures based on historical indus...