That dig in Arizona made me question how we date pottery

I was out near Flagstaff last spring helping on a site, and we found this whole set of potsherds that didn't match the timeline we expected. The lead archaeologist kept saying they were from 1100 AD based on style, but a radiocarbon test on some organic residue came back 200 years later. Made me wonder if our whole typology system is a lot rougher than we admit. Has anyone else run into a big gap between traditional dating and lab results?

2 comments

2 Comments

charles_kim1d ago

Honestly, doesn't it feel like we put way too much trust in our own categories sometimes? I've noticed this same kind of thing with my buddy's home renovation - he spent months trying to date his old house by looking at doorknobs and window frames, but then he found a receipt from 1972 stuffed in a wall that totally threw everything off. Tbh, our brains love putting things in nice neat boxes, but the real world is always messier than that. So yeah, I think those gaps between traditional methods and hard science probably happen way more often than most archaeologists want to admit, in pottery and probably in a lot of other things too.

river_adams251d ago

That line about "our brains love putting things in nice neat boxes" really hits home. I see it everywhere these days, like how people try to fit their whole personality into a few labels or sort their music into rigid genres when most good songs blur the lines anyway. The world is just this big messy web of stuff and the more we try to force it into categories the more we miss the real picture.