Pro tip: dating a site from pottery sherds took me way longer than I expected

I was working on a dig in rural Virginia last fall, and we found a ton of broken pottery pieces near an old foundation. I figured I could just match them up with some online guides and get a rough date in a few hours. But man, I spent like two full days sorting through those sherds because the glazes and rim shapes were all over the place. Turns out there were multiple time periods mixed together, and I had to separate out 18th century stuff from early 19th century. I even had to email a specialist at a museum to help me ID some weird blue transferware pattern I'd never seen before. Has anyone else had a site where the pottery dates just refused to line up neatly?

2 comments

2 Comments

scott.grace1mo ago

That whole "multiple time periods mixed together" thing is exactly what got me on a site in upstate New York. We had these creamware sherds next to some really crude redware that looked way older, but then mixed in was this delicate pearlware that threw everything off. I ended up making a little reference board with string and paper tags just to sort them by paste color and glaze thickness, which sounds silly but actually helped. Another trick that saved me was checking the rim profiles against a few old archaeological reports I found online from nearby counties, since regional differences can really mess with the standard guides.

the_evan1mo ago

Multiple time periods mixed together" is basically just the universe's way of telling you to stop being so confident about your dating skills. But hey, at least you got a cool reference board out of it, @scott.grace. I did something similar once except mine was just a bunch of sticky notes on my wall that eventually fell off and I had to redo the whole thing. Your rim profile trick is solid though, I've had to do that with local reports too because the standard guides seem to think every pot was made in Philadelphia or something.