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Drove myself crazy with pottery sherd IDs until a field tech showed me one trick
I spent like 6 months trying to match every little piece of broken pottery to specific types using books and online guides. It was taking forever and I kept getting stuff wrong. Then this older field tech at a site near Memphis pulled me aside and said just focus on the TEMPER first, not the decoration or shape. He showed me how to look at crushed shell versus sand versus grog under a hand lens. Suddenly I could sort a whole bag of sherds in 15 minutes instead of an hour. Made me feel kind of dumb for overcomplicating it but hey, it works. Has anyone else had a basic field trick that saved them a ton of time?
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elizabeths5126d ago
Exactly what @the_spencer said - temper first, then everything else falls into place.
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the_spencer26d ago
Wait, was he talking about distinguishing grit-tempered from shell-tempered, or did he get into the fine-grained stuff like distinguishing different types of sand? That's the part I always struggle with - I can see crushed shell okay but differentiating between say, a fine quartz sand and a crushed granite temper under a 10x loupe makes my eyes cross. Did he have a specific method for telling the small particles apart, or does it just come down to practice and knowing what local clays look like?
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