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The Roman Pottery of Kent
by Dr Richard J. Pollard  -  Chapter 2  page 19
Doctoral thesis completed in 1982, published 1988


Fig. 9.  Peripheral sites included in the study.

occurrence of secondary dispersal centres (see for example Hodder and Orton 1976). These phenomena may be recognisable in simple point-distribution maps wherein the presence or absence of the artefacts under discussion is plotted (e.g. the distribution of Colchester mortaria -  Hartley 1973a, fig. 7), but the facility of discussing relative quantities of artefacts enables a greater depth of discussion of such phenomena to take place.
   Four measures of quantity were considered by Orton (1975; cf. 1980, 156—67) in a paper aimed at assessing the merits and demerits of each measure. Two criteria for assessment were proposed: (i) the measure should give a ‘good’ estimate of the relative proportions of different types 

in one context, and more importantly (ii) it should be such that valid comparisons of these proportions can be made between one context and another’. The four measures are subsequently ordered in decreasing merit: equivalent number of vessels; weight of sherds; number of sherds; number of vessels represented (often expressed as a minimum). The present author consequently elected to employ the first method; rim sherds only were analysed, as these provide information about the form, size and function of vessels that is rarely discernible from base sherds, which tend to exhibit a high degree of formal conservatism and less variety in size than rims. The method has the incidental advantage that only a small proportion of an

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