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Found a simple way to date pottery shards at my local dig site
I was stuck on identifying some plainware shards from a site near Flagstaff last month. Tried the usual stuff like looking at paste color and inclusions but nothing matched the reference guides. Then I remembered a trick from an old field school: tap two shards together and listen to the pitch. The higher pitched ones turned out to be from a later period based on the rim profiles. Has anyone else used sound as a quick sorting method before lab analysis?
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kai_webb911mo ago
That trick works sometimes but there's a catch. The pitch difference can also come from how thick the shard is or if it's got tiny cracks you can't see. Clay recipes change over time too which throws the sound off. Better to use it as a rough guess and then check with something more solid like temper analysis. Just don't swap your lab time for tapping shards together.
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vera1951mo ago
Yeah but hold up @kai_webb91, tapping shards is way faster than running tests and sometimes that's all you need in the field. The pitch differences from cracks and thickness are real but experienced people can usually tell those apart from actual material differences. Not everything has to be super precise when you're just trying to get a quick read on things.
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