A morphometric approach to the classification and sequencing of the Iron Age II pottery of Tel Ashkelon, Israel

Seong Hyun Park

The present study represents the first major effort toward establishing a ceramic sequence of the Iron Age II strata at Tel Ashkelon, Israel. A morphometric methodology is developed and used for the classification of the representative rim-forms of the assemblages from Phases 16-14 of Grid 38, Tel Ashkelon. The result is a typology of ceramic corpus that is scalable, i.e., it can be analyzed at different levels of precision, and the ceramic sequence based on this 'core' set of data is then used to establish the dating of the ceramic sequence in Grid 2 of Tel Ashkelon. The comparison of the assemblage with the published data from elsewhere in the Southern Coast of Israel demonstrates that, while much of the ceramic forms found in the Iron Age II Tel Ashkelon were common to the region in general, Tel Ashkelon was second to none in the region in exhibiting an affinity with the Phoenician...