Update: I changed how I think about pottery shards at dig sites

I used to treat every single piece as a potential museum piece, cataloging them all with the same detail. After working on a site in rural Greece for two years, I saw how this slowed everything down for maybe one important find. Now I do a quick visual sort first, focusing on pieces with clear markings or unique shapes. Has anyone else shifted their field methods like this?

3 comments

3 Comments

wendy8202mo ago

Consider the soil color around the shards. On a dig in Turkey, I started noting which pottery fragments came from ashy layers versus clean fill. That simple visual check saved lab time later, because the pieces from hearth areas were almost always just plain domestic ware, while the nicer painted stuff came from specific trash pits. It's a fast filter that tells you about context before you even pick up a brush.

leo_black762mo ago

But what if the soil color is misleading? Ash layers can get mixed up over time, and nice pottery could easily end up in a hearth area from later digging. Relying on a quick look might make you ignore a good find because it came from the "wrong" colored dirt. You could be throwing out important data before giving it a proper check. Sometimes the plain stuff is in the trash pits and the fancy bits are in the ash. It just seems risky to use color as a rule.

shane_park922mo ago

Used to think color coding was just a neat trick until I worked on a Roman site in Spain. We had this one square where the soil was this uniform gray ash, and we almost skipped it as just another burnt layer. But my supervisor made us sift it all, and we pulled out a perfect little bronze coin from the very bottom. It was totally out of place color-wise. Now I still use color as a first guess, but I never let it stop me from checking a bucket of dirt properly.