Applying Mathematical Morphology for the Classification of Iberian Ceramics from the Upper Valley of Guadalquivir River

摘要

Although the potential of morphometrics for the study of archaeological artefacts is recognized, quantitative evaluation of the concordance between such methods and traditional typology and the potential of these techniques as supported methodologies in the archaeological analysis is a pending task. We present a new method to characterize and classify wheel-made pottery by its profile, using Mathematical Morphology. Each piece is represented as a vector, obtained by sampling the so called morphological curves (erosion, dilation, opening and closing), and Euclidean Distance is used as a similarity measure. The proposed technique has been studied using a sample of 1133 complete ceramic vessels from the Iberian archaeological sites from the upper valley of Guadalquivir River (Andalusia, Spain), showing that it is compatible with the existing corpus, established by experts.