A volunteer coordinator in Athens changed how I date pottery shards

I was helping sort a dig site collection near the Acropolis last month, and this older guy, Theo, kept shaking his head at my notes. He finally said, 'You're reading the glaze like it's a recipe, not a fingerprint.' That hit different because I'd been obsessing over color and thickness for weeks, but he showed me how the tiny air bubbles in the clay form in patterns tied to specific kiln batches. Now I'm re-checking a set of handles I labeled as Classical, and three might actually be Roman copies. Has anyone else had a mentor flip their whole sorting system with one weird phrase?

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