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Chatted with a field archaeologist in Montana and he turned my whole view of pottery upside down
I was at a diner near Billings last month and sat next to a guy who'd been digging on the Crow Reservation for 15 years. He told me most people think broken pottery is just trash, but he can read a site's whole story from a single rim sherd shape and temper type. He showed me photos of a cooking pot he'd pieced back together from 43 fragments, each one telling him something about trade routes or family size. It hit me different because I always just saw old pots as artifacts, not as everyday tools people used and broke and lived with. Have any of you had a conversation with someone in the field that completely changed how you look at something basic?
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dylanh9728d ago
That guy talking about the temper is the real key. Weirdly enough they can actually use X-ray fluorescence now to fingerprint the exact clay source from a tiny sherd and map out trade networks hundreds of miles wide. Kinda blew my mind that a broken pot can trace someone's trip across three states.
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elizabeth22029d ago
Correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think you can read family size from a pot sherd. That's more of a guess based on the size of the vessel and how much food it could hold. Like you can tell if it was a big cooking pot for a big family or a little one for a couple people, sure. But saying each fragment tells them about trade routes or family size is overselling it a bit. They mostly look at things like where the clay came from and what kind of temper was used to figure out trade stuff. Still a cool conversation to have though.
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phoenix_adams6029d ago
Oh for crying out loud. I mean, come on. You're telling me you can't just look at a broken piece of pottery and know exactly how many kids were running around the house? I guess my whole career in archaeology was a lie. Next thing you'll tell me is that carbon dating doesn't tell us what the person had for breakfast. Seriously though, you're right of course. People hear "every sherd tells a story" and they take it way too literally. It's more like every sherd tells a little piece of a much bigger puzzle, and even then you're mostly guessing. But hey, at least you can tell if someone was making soup for a crowd or just themselves, so that's something.
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