Serious question, did anyone else think pottery shards were just broken junk for way too long?

I was volunteering at a dig near Tucson last fall, and for weeks I'd toss these little brown bits into the 'discard' bucket without a second thought. They looked like plain old dirt clods to me. Then the lead archaeologist, Dr. Chen, pulled one out and spent twenty minutes showing us the curve of the rim and the specific way the clay was tempered with crushed rock. She said that one piece could tell us about trade routes and who lived there. My whole view flipped in that moment. I'd been treating the site like a treasure hunt for whole objects and ignoring the real story in the plain stuff. How do you train your eye to spot the important fragments from the actual rubble?

2 comments

2 Comments

hugo_cooper14d ago

Totally get that shift in thinking, it's a game changer. Just want to add that calling it 'rubble' might be a bit off though. Even the plainest looking dirt and rocks are part of the site's story and get recorded. The trick is learning to see everything as potential evidence, not sorting treasure from trash. It's more about context than just the object itself.

paul11714d ago

Yeah that's a super common thing. Honestly thought the same until I helped sort finds at a local museum. The lady there showed me a box of what looked like gravel. She pointed out a tiny piece with a glaze color that only came from one town fifty miles away. It clicked then. The broken stuff is the actual record. Now I try to look at the shape and material first, not just if it's a whole object.