My pottery shard puzzle took a whole day to piece together

I was helping sort finds from a dig site near Tucson, and we had this one box labeled 'mixed vessel fragments' that looked simple. It turned out to be pieces from at least four different pots all jumbled together (which was, you know, not ideal). We spent about eight hours just trying to sort them by clay type and glaze before we could even start matching edges. Has anyone else had a simple cataloging job blow up like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

sandra91615h ago

Oh man, that sounds like a total nightmare. Sorting by clay and glaze first was smart, but eight hours just to get to the starting line is brutal. Did you ever figure out why the fragments got mixed up in the first place? Like, was it a field lab packing error, or did the context in the ground just get totally messed up by something?

grant_wilson7214h ago

Honestly sounds like a lot of fuss over old broken plates. Maybe the mix-up happened cause it's just dirt and junk after hundreds of years. Not everything needs a full detective story, sometimes stuff just gets messy.