That lecture on Bronze Age tool wear patterns totally flipped my view on pottery marks

Honestly, I used to think any scratch on an ancient pot was just garbage data from the dig. I spent like two years ignoring those surface marks in my reports. Then I went to a guest talk at the local museum last month where this archaeologist showed how tiny striations on pottery match specific sandstone grinding tools from around 1500 BCE. They had side-by-side microscope shots of tool marks and pot scratches that lined up perfectly. It hit me that I was throwing away evidence of how these vessels were made and used. Now I photograph every single mark with a scale bar and log them in my database. Has anyone else here started cataloging something they used to ignore?

3 comments

3 Comments

kaiharris27d ago

Got a buddy who works in a medieval coin hoard cleanup, total mess of silver pennies all bunched together. He said he used to just brush off the dirt and toss them in a bag for the conservator. Then one day he noticed these weird little black spots on a couple coins that looked like somebody had dripped wax on them. Turns out, after he showed a senior curator, they matched records of a local 12th century merchant who sealed his coin bags with beeswax stamps. Now he photographs every single coin face and edge before he even breathes near it, looking for wax traces, textile fragments, anything. He found one last week with a tiny bit of wool still stuck to the rim, probably from the pouch it was carried in.

gavinlopez27d ago

lol I feel this one hard. I had a similar wakeup call with bone fragments a few years back, used to just bag them up for the faunal specialist without a second look. Started taking macro photos of butchery marks with a cheap phone microscope attachment and it changed everything, you can actually see the difference between metal blade cuts and stone tool slices based on the groove profile. A UV light is your best friend for finding residue traces too, I picked one up for like 15 bucks on Amazon and it revealed organic stains on stuff I had totally written off as blank. Good on you for logging the striations now, you're probably gonna start seeing patterns that connect different site layers in ways nobody expected.

tara_jones9422d ago

Hmm, holding onto every little fragment and stain might be overkill for most digs. A lot of that stuff turns out to be modern contamination or just dirt that looks interesting under a UV light. Focused cataloguing like that can eat up your whole field season for maybe one or two meaningful finds. How do you decide which traces are worth the time?