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Just realized the museum storage tour in Denver changed how I look at broken pottery
I went to the Denver Museum of Nature and Science about 4 months ago for a behind the scenes storage tour. A collections manager named Ray pulled out a tray of plain brown pot pieces from a site in southwestern Colorado and said most of what they keep is broken stuff nobody would put on display. He told us the rim shapes and clay mix tell you more about trade routes than any whole pot because whole pots usually came from graves and were fancy. That hit me because I had been walking past sherd piles on survey work for years and only writing down the pretty ones. Since then I photograph every rim and base fragment I find and note the temper, even the ugly ones. Last month on a site near Cañon City I caught a gray ware rim that turned out to be a trade piece from way farther south. It took a museum storage room to make me actually look at the junk. Anybody else have a curator or lab person flip how you record field finds?
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cole_mitchell824d ago
Read a while back about some archaeologist who said like 90 percent of what gets dug up is trash and that trash is where the real info lives, since fancy stuff was usually made just for burials. Kind of wild how much of the story comes from the stuff everyone tosses aside. Your gray ware rim find sounds like a solid catch, that's the exact kind of thing that used to get skimmed right over. I have not done field work myself but I heard a lab tech on a podcast say the same thing about how she learns more from a bag of plain body sherds than from one whole vessel. Makes you wonder how many trade routes got missed because someone only bagged the pretty pieces.
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