Old professor told me I was dating my pottery shards wrong...

I was at a dig outside Santa Fe last spring and kept grouping all the black-on-white sherds together by color. This retired guy from UNM walked over and said I was missing the whole story because I wasn't looking at the rim profiles... Now I spend 20 extra minutes per bag matching edges and it's way more accurate. Has anyone else had to unlearn a bad habit from a stranger on site?

2 comments

2 Comments

mila_sullivan14d ago

Old professor might have been right about the rim profiles but he's wrong that black-on-white sherds don't tell you anything. The decoration style can narrow the site's timeframe by centuries if you know the local sequence. Matching edges is good for refits but don't throw out the color groupings entirely since they help with spatial analysis.

william81614d ago

Had a buddy who worked a site down in the Mimbres valley a few years back. He said they'd spend hours sorting sherds by color groups, and it pissed off the grad students until they realized the black-on-white pieces were clustering around the old pueblo rooms while the plain brown stuff was scattered all over the midden. Pretty much backed up what @mila_sullivan is saying about spatial analysis. The color groups helped them map out where people were living versus where they tossed their trash. Would have taken them twice as long to figure that out with just edge matching and rim profiles.