williamd70•16d agoTop Commenter

Dating a Roman layer in York took 6 months longer than my supervisor budgeted for

I was working on a dig near the River Ouse in York and we hit a layer of what looked like Roman pottery fragments mixed with medieval brick. Problem was the pottery had no clear stamp or style I could match to any known local kilns. My supervisor told me it would take 2 weeks to date it but it took almost 8 months because we had to send samples to a lab in Durham and wait for carbon dating results. Has anyone else had a simple site layer turn into a huge timeline mess just because of a few weird pot sherds?

2 comments

2 Comments

john_sullivan215d ago

@anna_craig makes a good point, I saw a similar issue discussed on a dig blog last month.

anna_craig16d ago

Geez, that sounds like a nightmare. I had a similar thing happen with a site near Hadrian's Wall where some imported Samian ware looked local and sent us on a wild goose chase for months. What finally helped was checking the soil chemistry around the sherds for any unusual trace elements that could tell us where they really came from.