ACCURATELY ESTIMATING VESSEL VOLUME FROM PROFILE ILLUSTRATIONS

The highly fragmented nature of most archaeological ceramic assemblage s makes whole or reconstructible vessels valuable and rare finds. Vess el volume has rarely been systematically quantified because convenient reconstruction methods dealing with sherds and partial vessels have b een lacking. Now, with the method presented in this paper, highly accu rate volumetric capacities of fragmented vessels can be calculated fro m carefully prepared vessel profile illustrations. The profile is digi tized using a small number of points per vessel (20 to 30 points are u sually sufficient). These data are then converted to a volumetric meas ure using a computerized algorithm based on the geometry of stacked be vel-walled cylinders. This method of determining vessel volumes was te sted and shown to be highly repeatable and accurate. Quantifiable sour ces of error are generally limited to less than one percent per vessel , with the final accuracy limited chiefly by the quality of illustrati on. with this computerized technique, fragmented vessels no longer nee d to be fully reconstructed in order to obtain volumetric information.