Jon Ross

University of Manitoba | UMN · Department of Anthropology

Who made figurines for ritual feasting in the Late Bronze Age (LBA) palace at Tel Beth-Shemesh? This article attempts to answer this question by determining the age and sex of fingerprints on five zoomorphic figurines and a lamp from a unique room in the LBA IB–IIA palace that contains an assemblage normally associated with feasting. The age and se...

Most studies of ritual and symbolism in early complex societies of the Near East have focused on elite and/or public behavioural domains. However, the vast bulk of the population would not have been able to fully participate in such public displays. This paper explores the zooarchaeological and associated archaeological evidence for household ritua...

The organization of craft production has long been a marker for broader social, economic and political changes that accompanied urbanism. The identity of producers who comprised production groups, communities, or workshops is out of reach using conventional archaeological data. There has been some success using epidermal prints on artefacts to iden...

The organization of craft production has long been a marker for broader social, economic, and political changes that accompanied urbanism. The identity of producers who comprised production groups, communities, or workshops is out of reach using conventional archaeological data. There has been some success using epidermal prints on artifacts to ide...

The Experimental Archaeo Group is an informal archaeology graduate student initiative for pooling ideas and skills into creating experimental typesets, with the express purpose of expanding our reference knowledge for understanding past behaviours related to food provision and subsistence in prehistory. In this paper, we present on two of our curre...

In this paper, we present an alternative approach for identifying pottery production groups by classifying shaping techniques on freshly cut thick sections. We expand existing identification criteria by piloting a new method for characterising vessel structure. We demonstrate how this simple and low-cost method permits clear and rapid identificatio...

In this paper, we propose an alternative analytical method for identifying vessel shaping techniques at the mesoscopic scale to complement current micro and macro methods in ceramic analysis. We demonstrate how this simple and low cost method permits clear and rapid identification of the signatures indicative of different pottery shaping techniques...

The Early Bronze Age (ca. 2850-2500 BCE) ceramic technology project at Tell es-Safi/Gath is part of a broad front-forward movement in knowledge to advance understanding of the making of prehistoric vessels, in recognition of the wider anthropological significance of techniques and the co-becoming of crafters and the objects they make. The project c...

The organisation of production in early state societies in the Near East is often assumed to involve the development of specialised workshops. Yet little attention has been paid to the organization of production in domestic contexts. In this paper, we use the classification of variability in pottery forming techniques to investigate the organizatio...

In this pilot study, we show how a simple and low cost ceramic analytical method permits clear and rapid identification of features indicative of shaping techniques. This mesoscopic approach facilitates a more complete understanding of the manufacturing sequence and the organisation of production at Tell es-Safi/Gath, Israel.