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Spent a whole month trying to figure out a broken pottery piece
It was a single shard from a dig near Tucson, looked like plain brownware. I kept trying to match it to known local types, but the clay was wrong. Turns out it was trade ware from over 300 miles away, which changed our whole site timeline. Anyone else get stuck on a tiny find that flipped a project?
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william_garcia1mo ago
Describe how you finally cracked it. Did you run a chemical test on the clay or just get lucky comparing pictures?
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ellioth371mo ago
Honestly thought I'd need a lab test at first, but ended up just putting high-res photos side by side on my second monitor. The way the light hit the glaze in one specific photo matched a known piece perfectly, which was a total lucky break lol.
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kimr741mo ago
Yeah sometimes you just get lucky with the lighting like that. I did something similar last year, just comparing pics on my phone screen. @william_garcia I never got around to any real tests either.
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