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Changed my mind about using dental picks for small pottery sherds | Archaeology Discoveries - SMM Buzz

Changed my mind about using dental picks for small pottery sherds

I used to think it was a waste of time to bother with dental picks and tiny brushes on those little pottery fragments. I always just used a trowel and hoped for the best. But I was working a site near Santa Fe last fall where the sherds were really small and fragile. My supervisor told me to slow down and try the dental pick approach on a test unit. After about 4 hours of careful work I started pulling out pieces with painted lines I would have totally missed. It added maybe 20 percent more time to the excavation but the amount of stuff I recovered doubled. What specific tools do you guys use for delicate ceramic recovery?

2 comments

2 Comments

blakem373mo ago

Man just wait until you get stuck with a unit full of fire-cracked rock and someone hands you a dental pick. Four hours in your back starts screaming and you're picking at what looks like a piece of charcoal but it turns out to be a tiny obsidian flake that you accidentally snapped in half. Rookie mistake right there. I switched to using bamboo skewers from the grocery store for the really delicate stuff. They're cheap and if you snap one it doesn't feel like losing a 40 dollar tool.

mia7483mo ago

72 sherds in one afternoon from a 1x1 meter unit near Chaco Canyon really changed my mind about that too. The bamboo skewers are a good idea but you gotta be careful with them because they can leave little scratches on the painted surfaces if you're not gentle. I actually use a set of precision tweezers from a craft store, the ones with the really fine tips, they run about 8 bucks and last forever if you don't drop them in the dirt. And for the really tiny stuff like maybe 5mm obsidian flakes I just use a wet paintbrush to lift them up instead of poking around with anything sharp