TIL a 40 year gap in a Texas dig site turned out to be a museum storage mix-up, not a real gap

Simon Carr · 2026-10-23T08:25:03.676162+00:00

I volunteer sorting boxes at a small museum in Abilene and last month I was going through a collection labeled from a site near Amarillo. There was a note in the file saying the site had a 40 year gap in the pottery styles, which never sat right with me. Turned out two boxes got swapped in the 1980s, and when I put the layers back in order the gap just disappeared. The pottery changed styles slowly the whole time, no sudden jump at all. Has anyone else run into old storage mistakes that ended up rewriting part of a site's timeline?

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TIL a 40 year gap in a Texas dig site turned out to be a museum storage mix-up, not a real gap | Archaeology Discoveries - Vivisector