My big pottery sorting blunder at the county dig site

So I've been volunteering at this dig near my town for about six months, mostly sorting through buckets of dirt and broken bits. I was so proud of my system for the pottery shards, separating them by color into little trays. Last week, the lead archaeologist, Dr. Miller, walked over, picked up a piece from my 'red' pile, and just said, 'That's not a pot, Kim. That's a very old, very crumbly brick fragment.' I'd been putting construction debris from the 1920s farmhouse that used to be on the land in with the actual Roman-era finds this whole time. The tip-off was the texture, she said pottery has a specific feel that brick doesn't. I felt my face get so red. Has anyone else mixed up modern junk with the real stuff for way too long before figuring it out?

3 comments

3 Comments

sullivan.finley1mo ago

Heard a story about a guy who collected "fossils" for years that turned out to be just weird shaped rocks from a creek bed.

jade_singh26d ago

Kinda gotta correct you there - fossils are weird shaped rocks by definition, just ones with old bones or imprints in them. So the guy wasn't totally wrong, he just had a bad eye for what counted as a fossil.

grantadams1mo ago

My entire rock collection from age ten was just driveway gravel I thought looked special. I had them sorted by "type" in an old shoebox. Felt pretty dumb when my dad finally pointed it out.