Potter’s Signal in Ceramic Vessel Forms: A Pairwise Morphometric Approach

This article addresses a long-standing issue in archaeological analysis: how to identify vessels made within the same production unit on the basis of form alone. It proposes and tests two complementary morphometric procedures for pairwise comparison of ceramic vessels. The first uses analytically defined vessel parts and compares their proportional and angular properties; the second measures similarity in the continuous curvature of vessel profiles. Both approaches are designed to distinguish similarity patterns that reflect shared production practice from those that fall within ordinary variation in traditional pottery. Validation on large experimental and ethnographic datasets shows that vessel form preserves a reproducible signal of production-unit-specific practice, but that the strength of this signal depends on the degree of technological standardization. The two procedures are not interchangeable: each captures different aspects of morphological variability, and their limited overlap indicates complementarity rather than redundancy. Application of the methods to the Roman-period cemetery of Frontovoe 3 in southwestern Crimea shows that morphologically linked vessels tend to occur in graves that are close in date, suggesting that ceramic similarity may also serve as an auxiliary chronological indicator. The study therefore offers a more explicit and reproducible basis for typological reasoning in archaeology.