Bruce D. Owen

Bruce Owen
Research Associate
Research Website: 
Bruce Owen's Research Website

Bruce Owen is a Research Associate at the Archaeological Research Facility at UC Berkeley and an Archaeologist/Editor at the Anthropological Studies Center (ASC) at Sonoma State University. He has a Ph.D. in Anthropology from UCLA (1993) and taught in the Anthropology department at Sonoma State through 2017.

Region(s): 
Peru, California
Research Theme(s): 
Andean prehistory, Archaeometallurgy, geospatial, Photogrammetry

Archaeometallurgy and Historical Ecology on the 5th and 6th Century Osaka Plain

Slag

Excavated sporadically for over thirty years, Ōgata in Kashiwara City and Mori in Katano City are the largest-scale Kofun Period ironworking sites in Osaka Prefecture, Japan. Large numbers of forging slags have been unearthed from both sites, which alongside partially preserved hearth features, provide the bulk of evidence for ironworking. Following methods developed by French archaeometallurgists, novel analyses of these forge slags correlate different slag materials with different forging activities.