Can we talk about how we used to treat pottery shards?

Back in the 90s, our team in Turkey would just bag and tag every single piece. Now we do on-site 3D scanning with a Faro arm before moving anything. The shift happened after a dig near Ephesus where context got totally lost. Anyone else switch their field methods recently?

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3 Comments

lisaf387mo ago

Yeah, the change is huge. We used to just number boxes and hope the notes made sense later. Now everything gets photographed in place from multiple angles before it even gets touched. Saves so many arguments during lab work.

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cooper.phoenix7mo ago

My 2012 dig photos are basically useless now.

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the_linda7mo ago

Oh man, that's so true! It's not just the photo quality either, the whole way we store them changed. My old hard drive from back then is a weird brick that nothing can even read now. Honestly, the real loss is the context we didn't think to capture, like what the ground looked like three meters over.

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