Took me 4 hours to match one pottery sherd to a museum catalog number, and I almost quit twice

Ruby Walker · 2026-10-01T10:55:03.936651+00:00

I do volunteer sorting at the local archaeological society in Tucson on Saturdays, mostly washing and bagging stuff from a pueblo site. Last weekend I got handed a box of 60 plain brown body sherds from a 1970s excavation that never got fully written up. My job was simple in theory: match each one to the site report so we can rebag it right. It took me 4 hours to do 12 sherds because the catalog used temper types instead of paste colors, and half the notes were in cursive on onionskin paper that had gone see-through. Around hour two I put down my pen and seriously thought about just labeling the whole box "misc." and moving on. Then I found a rim fragment with a faint corrugated band that I could actually cross-check, and that one tiny detail unlocked the next 5 sherds in 20 minutes. So the whole thing was less about knowledge and more about grinding through bad records until one clue shows up. Anyone else run into old site paperwork that fights you harder than the actual dig did?

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Took me 4 hours to match one pottery sherd to a museum catalog number, and I almost quit twice | Archaeology Discoveries - Hub Chatter