Author: William Cowling
Cowling, William, 2024 Lost Context: elemental analysis of unprovenienced 15th and 16th century Vietnamese jarlets using pXRF, Flinders University, College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Terms of Use: This electronic version is (or will be) made publicly available by Flinders University in accordance with its open access policy for student theses. Copyright in this thesis remains with the author. You may use this material for uses permitted under the Copyright Act 1968. If you are the owner of any included third party copyright material and/or you believe that any material has been made available without permission of the copyright owner please contact copyright@flinders.edu.au with the details.
This thesis investigates the potential for interpreting secondary and tertiary depositional contexts of unprovenienced cargo through the application of pXRF as an analytical technique. This study focuses on a set of 55 Vietnamese blue and white high-fired stoneware small jars known as jarlets. These jarlets form a small part of a much larger ceramics collection housed at the Southeast Asia Ceramic Archaeology Lab (SEACAL) at Flinders University. The ceramics of this collection are considered ‘grey/orphaned’ objects, which lack archaeological context, as they were salvaged from shipwrecks within Indonesian territorial waters.
Currently there are no recorded examples of similar ceramics found from shipwrecks within Indonesian waters. Examples of these ceramics have been found in Southeast Asia, mainly from shipwrecks within territorial waters of both Vietnam and the Philippines. This has led to the hypothesis that the Vietnamese blue and white jarlets were salvaged from an unidentified shipwreck in Indonesia.
This study aims to evaluate the effectiveness of pXRF as an analytical method in identifying significant compositional differences between both Vietnamese jarlets and a selection of comparable Vietnamese and Chinese ceramics. pXRF was used in conjunction with principal component analysis and hierarchical cluster analysis to group the ceramics based on their elemental composition. The results demonstrate that pXRF is a viable analytical technique for identifying significant differences. The Vietnamese jarlets exhibit characteristics, mainly in relation to the motif, which differ from traditional understandings. This distinction is most prominent in the absence of manganese found in the ceramic motifs, which varies with the high manganese content found in other Vietnamese blue and white stoneware ceramics. This variation arises from the cobalt used, as it contained traces of manganese. The pXRF results, along with the lack of known examples in Indonesia, result in the hypothesis that these ceramics differ from the comparable Vietnamese blue and white ceramics, and the conclusion that came from an unidentified shipwreck.
Keywords: Archaeology, underwater cultural heritage, Indonesia, Vietnam, pXRF, cobalt
Subject:
Thesis type: Masters
Completed: 2024
School: College of Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences
Supervisor: Martin Polkinghorne