Warning: Trying to date a single piece of pottery from a mixed layer is a nightmare

Honestly, I spent the last two weeks on what should have been a one-day job. I was working on a site report from a dig in Santa Fe, and we had this one really nice black-on-white sherd. The problem was it came from a layer that got messed up by rodent burrows, so the context was totally mixed. I figured I'd just run it through the lab's XRF scanner, compare it to the known types, and be done. Ngl, that was naive. The elemental signature was weird, not matching any local clay sources cleanly. I had to cross-check with thin-section analysis, then pull old site reports from three different museums to look at similar designs. What I thought would take maybe 6 hours ended up consuming over 80 hours of my time. Has anyone else had a simple artifact turn into a massive research rabbit hole because of bad context?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_jana13h ago

Totally feel that. It's like when you go to fix one small thing in your house and suddenly you're three days deep into a full remodel because of one weird pipe. Bad context just ruins everything.

sage_green9h ago

That one weird pipe is always out to get you.

mark4366h ago

Tell me about it.