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Got stuck for two weeks trying to date a single pottery shard from a dig near Tucson
Found this plain looking piece in a test pit, thought it would be a quick ID. My professor said 'just run it through the lab,' but the carbon dating came back with a weird range that didn't match the site's other stuff. I ended up spending over 14 days cross checking soil layers and comparing it to pieces from three other sites before we pinned it down as a trade item from much farther south. Has anyone else had a simple find turn into a massive time sink like that?
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faith_hart203mo ago
Yeah that "massive time sink" feeling is real, but cross checking with other sites like you did is what finally worked for me too.
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the_rowan3mo ago
Massive time sink" is how you learn though, that's the job. My worst one was a bone fragment that looked modern but wasn't, and the process to figure that out is just what we do. Calling it a sink makes it sound like wasted time.
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Yeah, @the_rowan you're right. That phrase makes it sound like you just wasted hours for nothing, but that's literally how we figure stuff out. I had a piece of ceramic once that looked exactly like a common modern type, but the context was all wrong. Spent three days going back and forth with the geologist before we realized it was a local clay nobody had documented properly. It was a slog, but that's the whole point of the job.
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