This paper reports the study of ancient potteries unearthed from the Guangfulin site in Shanghai. From the external features of these potteries, archeologists can classify them into two different cultural types: Liangzhu culture (local culture) and a new culture which might be derived elsewhere, but they can not recognize whether they were produced in the same place. Proton induced X-ray emission (PIXE) and instrumental neutron activation analysis (INAA) were used to measure the chemical compositions of the samples and the results were analyzed using multivariate statistics. We found that the two methods can complement each other and their database can be mutually referenced in the study of ancient potteries. Experimental results show that the compositions of the potteries from the two cultural types are different, which means that the materials for ancient potteries of new culture originate from elsewhere. This supports the archaeologists speculation that a group of ancient people migrated to Shanghai from some other places 4000 years ago.