The basic paste group descriptions were derived from the published and unpublished materials of Steadman. The decision to use paste as the key attribute was determined by her work on excavated Chiripa ceramics. However, the paste groups described above do not correspond to any of Steadman's pastes. Rather I arrived at them by performing a reanalysis of a series of bags of ceramics from the Chiripa excavations which Steadman had recommended to me as unmixed examples of the three Chiripa phases. These bags were from loci 2298 (435 sherds, Early Chiripa), 2299 (153 sherds, Early Chiripa), 2156 (214 sherds, Middle Chiripa), 2295 (113 sherds, Middle Chiripa), 2034 (305 sherds, Late Chiripa), 2036 (106 sherds, Late Chiripa), 2244 (207 sherds, Late Chiripa), 2247 (162 sherds, Late Chiripa) (see [Hastorf 1999,Hastorf and Bandy 1999] for a description of the TAP excavation and provenience system). The index profiles for the Chiripa phases were therefore based on an analysis by the author of 588 (Early Chiripa), 327 (Middle Chiripa) and 780 (Late Chiripa) sherds. While this is obviously not optimal, it does provide a usable baseline for frequency profile analysis.
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The index profiles for the Chiripa phases derived from this work are shown in Table 3.2. It is clear from these profiles that the frequencies of the three paste groups differ rather drastically from phase to phase. It is equally clear, though, that all paste groups are represented in all phases. Therefore, the find of a particular paste group on the surface of a site is not sufficient to indicate an occupation from any of the Chiripa phases. This situation is what makes frequency profile analysis necessary in the first place.
Again I must stress that my paste groups are not the same as Steadman's pastes. However, three of the bags which I analyzed (loci 2247, 2295, 2298) had previously been sorted for paste by Steadman. It is therefore possible to correlate my paste groups with her pastes. This is summarized in Table 3.1. It is clear, then, that my paste group 1 is strongly correlated with Steadman's Paste 21. My paste group 2 is composed primarily of Steadman's Pastes 19 and 26 (26 is characteristic of the Middle Chiripa phase), and paste group 3 is related to Paste 17, most common in the Early Chiripa phase. My paste groups therefore capture the crudest chronological implications of Steadman's paste chronology, while not pretending to the precision of her classification.