Monday, December 10, 2012

A flaring rim vessel

This is an illustration of a flaring rim, based on reconstructions carried out in 2003 and 2004 while working at the Museo Yacuma. The provenience code "sj-394" refers to a shovel test probe (a small test excavation) at the modern ranch of San Juan (on the southern bank of the lower IruyaƱez River). The shovel test was located in the middle of a dense scatter of ceramics, and all of the rim sherds that were recovered from that small probe are arranged into a histogram of rim radii. If you double the radius to make a diameter, then this vessel was about 40 centimeters across. The notes also indicate that it was painted on the upper surface (which would have been easily visible to a user, perhaps someone eating or drinking from the vessel. I used a feature in Adobe Illustrator to try and quickly turn rim profiles into approximations of vessel shape, by rotating the rim profile around an imaginary point at the appropriate distance.

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