Mineralogical characterization of an ancient pottery from the la Candelaria archaeological site, Santa Helena del Opón, Santander (Colombia)

Thousands of victims of medical errors exist in the clinical realm.1,2 Scientific work on archaeological ceramics based on the examination of ware shape, style, color, decoration and overall fabric, provide a wealth of information concerning typological and functional issues, chronology and provenance.1 In this context, ceramic technology has been a universal reference in archaeological studies to study different societies of the past and even consider relations of cultural and commercial exchange between continents.1,2 Several instrumental analytical techniques are applied to the study of ancient ceramics that allows peering ever more deeply into the frequently unsolved mysteries of their origin, manufacture and lifecycle. This means that the geological and chemical techniques encourage new scientific dialogues with the purpose of addressing archaeological questions of great scientific impact, whose objective is to solve the cultural identity of the ethnic group that makes the ceramic vessels, the origin of the pottery and its possibility of commercial exchange, manufacturing processes and chains and their relationship of archaeological context, whether funerary, daily, economic or the symbolic character associated with power and achieved through commercial exchange, etc. These techniques include X-ray fluorescence spectroscopy,1 X-ray diffraction,3,4 scanning electron microscopy,5 infrared and Raman spectroscopy,6‒9 high-resolution X-ray microtomography10 or gas chromatography–mass spectroscopy.11 However, the selection of the suitable analysis method should be based on the type, form and amount of sample to be analyzed.9 Archaeological analysis of ceramic technology and its socio-economic, cultural and historical scope, contrasted with data from geosciences, in addition to its documentation value,12,13 allows qualifying archaeological inferences based on the understanding of the attributes of the raw materials used for the manufacture of ceramic artifacts14,15 and the technology involved in the manufacturing process,16,17 which may reveal significant information about the provenance of the raw materials with which the ceramic artifacts were manufactured.18 The presence or absence of certain mineral phases provides information regarding the firing conditions in terms of both temperature and atmosphere used during pottery production.19 The archaeological problem of northern South America, has a central point that is the ethnic identification of agro-pottery societies through the technical study of its pottery production, which passes through the movements of populations and the occupation of the territory of northeastern Colombia in pre-Hispanic eras. The aim of this work was investigate an ancient pottery from the La Candelaria archaeological site, Santa Helena del Opón, Santander (Colombia), with analytical techniques which currently are being routinely used, to assess the relationship between the composition of the different pastes into the pottery sherds and their classification, to estimate possible ranges of firing temperatures, to evaluate the hypothesis that the local manufactured pottery.