This is a complex and articulated topic, that has been studied by many authors with a variety of approaches. There are no ready solutions, just a large set of techniques that can be used together when studying archaeological pottery. The most important author for quantitative studies on pottery is certainly Clive Orton.

• African Red Slip Ware from Northern Italy (400 – 700 AD)
• Gaulish and Hispanic Samian Ware and African Red Slip Ware from Tingitana

You can find some scripts that create good-looking plots for quantitative pottery data at http://bitbucket.org/steko/pottery-ggplot2/src/

These scripts are written in the R programming language and use the ggplot2 library. They assume that data are standardized in flat tables with variables like:

• shape of vessel
• reference to existing typologies (e.g. Hayes for ARSW)
• number of sherds, minimum number of vessels
• chronological lifespan of each type (expressed as two separate columns of beginning and end of production)
• fabric
• and others

• Chi-squared test
• …