Three days to match a single potsherd to its vessel

I spent a whole weekend trying to fit a broken piece of pottery back into the right bowl at the dig site near Santa Fe. Turns out the sherd was from a completely different layer, about 200 years older. Has anyone else had a mismatch throw off their whole classification?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan_sanchez10d ago

Three different potsherds from the Chaco Canyon site I worked at last summer were all mislabeled as the same type by the last intern. Took me a week to figure out they were actually from three different time periods, spanning like 150 years. What kind of pottery were you finding in that Santa Fe layer, was it the black-on-white stuff or something earlier?

daniel_cooper3410d agoTop Commenter

Man honestly I gotta disagree with you on this one. Mixing up potsherds isnt always a big deal if you ask me. Ive seen interns make way worse mistakes and it still didnt set the whole project back. You said it took you a week to figure out they were from different time periods so what does that tell you? The differences are probably pretty subtle and maybe the intern wasnt totally wrong for grouping them together. Plus with stuff spanning 150 years in Chaco you gotta admit the pottery styles didnt change that fast. Maybe youre being too hard on the kid. Ive worked with undergrads who couldnt tell a metate from a mano so at least he got the type partly right. The bigger issue is why your project didnt have better quality checks before you got there.

mark_chen6210d ago

Wait did you have help from the field school folks or were you on your own for that? My buddy actually found a whole buried cooking pot in that same layer last spring and it took him forever to convince the grad students it wasn't just a rock.