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Showerthought: a guy at a museum in Tucson pointed at a broken pot and made me rethink how I look at dig reports
Last spring I drove down to the Arizona State Museum for a small exhibit on Hohokam pottery and ended up standing next to this older volunteer named Ray for like 20 minutes. I was staring at a case of plain brown sherds, kind of bored honestly, and he leaned over and told me the plain ones are the interesting ones because fancy painted pots are usually grave goods or trade pieces, so they show up in a few spots, while everyday cooking ware is scattered everywhere and tells you where people actually lived. He pulled out a little notebook, flipped to a page of tally marks from a site near Snaketown, and showed me how the plain ware counts shifted by layer. Something about how he said the boring stuff is where the real story hides in the dirt just stuck with me for weeks. Now when I read a dig report I skip straight to the sherd tables before the big finds. Has anyone else had a random volunteer or docent change how they read site reports? I keep wondering if I'm the only one who ignored the plain stuff for too long.
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kevin_nguyen5418d ago
Fancy pots still pull the crowds though, boring counts don't.
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