Contents lists available at ScienceDirect Journal of Archaeological Science journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jas On quantifying and visualizing the potter's personal style Ortal Harush a,* , Naama Glauber b , Amit Zoran b , Leore Grosman a a The Computational Archaeology Laboratory, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Mount Scopus, Jerusalem 91905, Israel b The Design Hybrids Lab, The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Edmond J. Safra Campus, Jerusalem 91904, Israel ARTICLE INFO Keywords: Ceramic production Experimental archaeology Personal style Morphological analysis Visualization data analysis ABSTRACT Ceramic-sherds analysis has been concerned with categorizing to types according to vessel shape and size for the description of a given material culture. Yet, the characterization of ceramic variations and their meaning re- ceives little attention in the archaeological study. In the present research, we wished to monitor small-scale variations, searching for the unique signature of the individual potter during production. We thus examined new parameters for distinguishing between trainee potters and monitoring their distinct styles as part of an integrated experimental archaeological study. For the purposes of this research, ceramic students were instructed to produce the same part of a storage jar repeatedly for several days following a strict protocol—with a single prototype and using the same technique in the same workspace. All the produced items were 3-D scanned to extract accurate geometric parameters for classification. Cluster analysis was used to analyze the digital data, in addition to a novel data visualization technique that was developed for detecting ceramic variations. These methods enabled us to distinguish the potters by their individual styles, probably already established in the early stages of learning. Our results show that the novel visualization approach, together with the quantitative method, allows us to efficiently identify the location, on the vessels, of the potters' stylistic fingerprint. 1. Introduction The identification of artisan work in the archaeological record is not an easy task, mainly because retrieved archaeological artifacts do not usually represent a specific pinpointed event yet relate to an imprecise time span. Furthermore, we lack information on the artisans, about who produced the artifacts. Yet, searching for the artisans will help follow the variations within a social group and its social organization. In the absence of archaeological evidence for the artisans' work, scholars have turned to ethnography and experimental approaches for understanding the archaeological remains. Hill and Gunn (1977), in The Individual in Prehistory, raised issues concerning the importance of individual var- iation in craft production and provided methods for understanding variability in artifact assemblages. Their book was a precursor for many trends in archaeological research (Crown, 2007), in craft learning, skill and the identification of the artisans' work for classifying technological choices (Vitelli, 1989; Budden, 2008; Martinón-Torres and Uribe- Villegas, 2015), and on learning processes (Crown, 2001, 2014). Style is a general term often used among archaeologists and an- thropologists. Sackett has provided a general definition of style as a way of doing something and as part of the choices we make among various alternatives (Sackett, 1977). Generally, this definition is accepted by all, but the difficulty arises from the specifics. At the center of the an- thropological discussion about style stands Franz Boas, who claimed that the development of style involves the appearance of fixed forms and the stability of their appearance. Without these conditions, there can be no style. The artisans create standardized shapes and then apply creative improvisations to these shapes. The combination of technical excellence and adherence to shape gives the object its aesthetic value, thus creating a style. The impact of style is a mechanism of selection and differentiation—what the artisan chose, rejects and how his/her choices are structured into a distinct form that is by itself constant. All these express the stylistic code of the artisans (Boas, 1955). Moreover, most anthropologists use the term style in a way that allows for flexibility between collective and individuals, and between aesthetics and broader social aspects. The various definitions focus on different aspects, such as cognitive, information-transmitting or time–space oriented (Wobst, 1977; Sackett, 1977; Conkey, 1978; Weissner, 1983). Current study searched for a definition that can be tested, in quantitative means, as presented by Franz Boas (1955) - the search for fixed forms. This study aims to detect the stylistic fingerprint of the individual potter through an advanced shape analysis of ceramic sherds together with an experimental procedure to provide a higher resolution com- parison, by combining two approaches. The first, quantitative https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jas.2019.104973 Received 17 March 2019; Received in revised form 2 June 2019; Accepted 7 June 2019 * Corresponding author. E-mail address: Ortal.haroch@mail.huji.ac.il (O. Harush). Journal of Archaeological Science 108 (2019) 104973 0305-4403/ © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. T