Paid $120 for a pottery shard identification guide that was all wrong

Found this book online that claimed to be definitive for southwestern pottery types. Every sherd I tried to match from my dig site near Santa Fe didn't match a single photo in there. Has anyone else run into a reference guide that was basically useless?

2 comments

2 Comments

anthonykim18d agoMost Upvoted

Whoa, hold on. I gotta push back on this one a little bit. In my experience, those regional guides are only as good as the specific site you're digging at, and Santa Fe is a mixing bowl of different pueblo traditions and time periods. That book probably focuses on a handful of classic types like Jeddito or St. Johns, not the local stuff that changes every 50 miles. Your mileage may vary, but I've found that if you can't match a single sherd, it's usually the context of your dig that's the issue, not the book.

ivan52218d ago

Nah, but I’ve had the opposite luck with those books - they got me through some weird digs where nothing local matched up, and the general types were all I had to go on. Context can be a mess too when you’re dealing with stuff that got moved around or mixed up centuries ago.