Compare methods

	Ceramic Typology	Ceramic Thin-Section Petrography
Field	Archaeology	Archaeology
Family	Process / pipeline	Process / pipeline
Year of origin	1987	2013
Originator	Developed across 20th-century archaeology; synthesized by Prudence M. Rice	Adapted from geological petrography; codified for archaeology by Patrick Sean Quinn
Type	Attribute-based classification of pottery for chronology and cultural attribution	Optical microscopic characterization of ceramic fabrics for provenance and technology
Seminal source	Rice, P. M. (1987). Pottery Analysis: A Sourcebook. University of Chicago Press. ISBN: 9780226711188	Quinn, P. S. (2013). Ceramic Petrography: The Interpretation of Archaeological Pottery & Related Artefacts in Thin Section. Archaeopress. ISBN: 9781905739592
Aliases	Pottery Typology, Ceramic Classification, Ware and Type Classification, Type-Variety Analysis	Ceramic Petrography, Pottery Thin-Section Analysis, Petrographic Fabric Analysis, Optical Microscopy of Ceramic Fabrics
Related	2	2
Summary	Ceramic typology is the systematic classification of pottery into named groups — wares, types, and varieties — on the basis of shared attributes of form, fabric, surface treatment, decoration, and manufacturing technology. Because pottery is durable, ubiquitous, and changed rapidly in style, it is the archaeologist's most powerful tool for ordering sites and layers in time and for linking material to cultural traditions. As Prudence Rice's standard sourcebook sets out, a typology is built by recording consistent attributes, partitioning the assemblage into defined types, and arranging those types in a nested hierarchy that can then be quantified and compared across contexts. The resulting type frequencies become the raw material for relative dating, seriation, and the interpretation of trade, identity, and chronology.	Ceramic thin-section petrography characterizes pottery by examining a wafer-thin slice of a sherd under a polarizing microscope, the same instrument geologists use to study rocks. Because most pottery is made from clay tempered with sand, crushed rock, grog, or shell, the mineral and rock inclusions visible in thin section carry a geological fingerprint of the raw materials, while the clay matrix and voids record how the pot was formed and fired. As Patrick Quinn's reference work sets out, the analyst identifies and quantifies these constituents, sorts sherds into petrographic fabric groups, and then relates each group's mineralogy to regional geology to infer where the pottery was made and how it was manufactured. It bridges the visual world of ceramic typology and the elemental world of chemical provenance.