Just got back from a dig in Turkey and saw something that made me rethink everything about pottery dating

I was working on a site near Catalhoyuk for three weeks, mostly sifting through what we thought was a midden heap. One afternoon, my trowel hit a piece of ceramic that looked totally different from the Neolithic stuff we were finding. It was this tiny, glazed shard, maybe 2 centimeters across. My supervisor took one look and said, 'That's Byzantine, maybe 800 AD.' The thing is, it was in a layer we had carbon-dated to around 6000 BC. We spent the next two days carefully re-examining the entire stratigraphy and found a single, narrow animal burrow running right through the section. That one little tunnel had moved a piece of pottery thousands of years up the timeline. It was a huge reminder that context is everything, and a single disturbance can mess with your whole interpretation. Has anyone else had a find that completely flipped the script on a site's timeline like that?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_betty6d ago

Feel that pain, context is a real nightmare sometimes.

andrewr655d ago

Nah, I love a good puzzle actually.