2. Materials and methods
An awareness of the above mentioned issues prompted the
design of an alternative method. This method focuses on nonadjoining
sherds irrespective of their shape or quality and pays
special attention to the terminal steps of their use-lives, i.e. after
they became detached fragments. A threefold procedure was
developed that combined mainstream macroscopic aspects and a
microstructural compositional approach, which incorporated: a)
an initial systematic qualitative examination of the entire ceramic
collection, including a re-fitting experiment and a complete
taphonomic evaluation. This led to the identification of direct or
physical joins and non-physical but highly probable matches; b)
the selection among the highly probable but non-adjoining
matches of sherd-pairs representing a suite of sherds types and
taphonomic alterations, aimed at tackling a series of research
questions, and c) the use of thin section petrographic examination
and the digital image analysis of photomicrographs to verify the
previous observations in qualitative mineralogical and quantitative
textural terms