Question about a pottery shard I found on a dig in New Mexico

I was volunteering on a dig near Santa Fe last spring, helping to clear a small Anasazi site. We were told to be super careful with anything that looked worked, but honestly, I thought I'd just find more of the same plain brown pottery bits. Then my trowel hit something with a clear black line painted on it. I got excited and tried to pry it up fast, and the whole piece snapped clean in two. My stomach just dropped. The site lead came over, didn't yell or anything, just quietly showed me how to use a soft brush to loosen the dirt around finds first. We glued it back together later, and it turned out to be part of a really nice bowl rim. Has anyone else messed up a find in the field and managed to fix it?

3 comments

3 Comments

rowan_thomas8427d ago

Watched my buddy drop a nearly complete stone tool he'd just uncovered. It chipped the cutting edge pretty bad. He was gutted, but our supervisor mixed up some special putty to fill the chip for the museum display. You could barely tell after they painted it.

milam4827d ago

Why do we fix so much stuff just for show?

rowan_thomas8427d ago

Man, that's wild. So the fix was just for looks then? Does the museum label say it's been repaired, or do they just show it like it's perfect? I've always wondered how much of what we see in cases is actually original material versus filler holding it together. Seems like a big difference between fixing a display piece and pretending damage never happened.