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Reached 500 shards from one Roman site and it changed how I see ancient pottery
I've been digging through a Roman pottery dump in southern Spain for the last three summers. This past June I counted exactly 500 ceramic shards from just one 2-meter square trench. That number shocked me because it means people were throwing away dishes faster than I throw away paper plates. Most of the pieces were from simple cups and bowls, not fancy imported stuff. It really drove home how ordinary ancient life was, just messy and full of broken things. Has anyone else hit an unexpected number like that and had it reframe their whole view of a site?
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david_reed2219d ago
500 shards really isn't that crazy for a Roman site though. Like they went through dishes constantly and broke stuff all the time.
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gavin_kim19d ago
Yeah @david_reed22, "went through dishes constantly" is a decent way to put it but it undersells it a bit. Those samian ware bowls were basically the paper plates of the Roman world. A single household might trash a whole set every couple of years because the glaze was soft and chipped easily. Plus you had glass vessels which were even more fragile and the potters made stuff thin to save on materials. So 500 bits from one site is a light Tuesday for a busy kitchen.
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