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That dig in Turkey changed how I look at pottery shards forever
I was out on a volunteer dig near Çatalhöyük about 2 years ago and we found this huge pile of broken pottery. The lead archaeologist got into this big debate with a grad student about whether we should piece it all back together or just document the fragments and move on. One side said reconstructing gives you the full picture of how they used the vessels. The other side argued it wastes time and money that could go to finding new sites. I honestly leaned toward the reconstruction camp at first because it feels more satisfying. But after seeing them try to glue 30 shards back for three days straight, I started questioning if it's worth the effort. Has anyone else run into this split on a dig crew? What do you decide when time is tight?
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gavin_kim31mo agoTop Commenter
Respectfully gotta push back on that reconstruction debate. I've been on digs where we skipped piecing stuff together and we missed huge clues about how people actually used the vessels day to day. Like we found these shards with burn marks on the inside that only made sense once we saw the whole pot shape was meant for simmering over a fire. I get that gluing 30 shards takes forever but the information you lose by just documenting and moving on is way bigger than the time you save. Sometimes the slow work is the point, you know?
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jordancoleman1mo ago
The split on crew is real and I felt it too. What finally worked for me was taking photos of every single shard before gluing anything, plus doing a quick sketch of the overall layout in the dirt. That way if we ran out of time we still had the big picture info about how they were positioned and what kind of use wear was on them. Then we picked the three most interesting looking shards to reconstruct fully and let the rest get bagged and tagged for later. Saved us from burning three days on one pot while keeping the important details. The burn marks story is a good example of why you can't just skip everything, but you also can't glue every broken bowl you find.
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