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Spent 11 weeks trying to date a pottery shard from a site near Tucson, turns out the answer was in a 1978 letter
Back when I started digging in the late 90s, we ID'd most shards by eyeballing the temper and moving on. This one piece from a Hohokam site outside Tucson sat in my drawer for 11 weeks because the rim style matched three different phases. I finally mailed a rubbing to a retired archaeologist in Phoenix who wrote back in a hand-written letter pointing me to a 1978 sherd book I'd never heard of. Sure enough, the paste color plus that little coil seam put it at 950 CE. Does anyone still do rubbings and letters, or is everyone on XRF now?
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thompson.nathan12d ago
Wrote a letter. To a guy. About a shard. That is the most 1990s archaeology thing I have ever heard and I love it. Meanwhile I watched a grad student last month run a $40k XRF gun on a potsherd and still get the phase wrong because the calibration was off. Give me a hand drawn rubbing and a stamp any day. That retired guy in Phoenix probably ID'd more pottery from his kitchen table than half the labs out there.
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