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Spent a season feeling pottery bits and now I doubt style dating methods
I learned to tell ware types just by touch on a long field project. Most teams date artifacts by design, but I think how they were worn down says more. Who else checks use marks before jumping to style dates?
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skylercooper7mo ago
At the San Juan Pueblo dig, they found cooking pots with wear patterns that matched later time periods than the designs suggested. It made me wonder if we're missing how often people kept using old pots until they fell apart. You can see similar things in historic house sites where ceramic pieces get repurposed for decades. So yeah, focusing on use marks might fix some timeline errors we make by just looking at style. It's like the object's life story is in the scratches and not the paint.
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keithw597mo ago
Noticed the same on a Midwestern dig last summer. We had storage jars with design from the 1700s but wear on the bases that matched later 1800s tools. @skylercooper is right about objects living longer than we think. I started logging rim scratches and handle polish, and it shifted our view of the site's timeline.
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