Noticed a weird shift in how digs handle pottery sorting over the last decade

I was looking back at some notebooks from a 2013 dig in central Turkey, and we used to just sort sherds by color and thickness on site. Now with portable XRF scanners becoming common, sites like Çatalhöyük are logging chemical fingerprints on every rim piece before it even leaves the trench. It's wild how fast the tech changed the workflow. Has anyone else seen this kind of shift in their own excavations?

2 comments

2 Comments

diana2011d ago

Grabbed my old trowel the other day and realized it's probably worth more as a museum piece than for actual digging these days. Remember when we used to argue over whether a sherd was "light brown" or "tan"? Now the XRF just tells you it's got 2.3% iron oxide and you're the one feeling wrong. Last season I watched a grad student scan a piece of broken pottery, get the chemical profile, and then upload it to a database before I could even find my magnifying glass. Feels like we traded dirt under our nails for data entry.

shane65510d ago

The 2015 season at Mycenae had us doing neutron activation on every tenth sherd from certain layers, and I sat through a three-hour meeting debating whether this was ruining the tactile knowledge of pottery identification. @diana20 mentioned that shift from color arguments to iron oxide percentages, and it reminds me of how our site supervisor back then couldn't read a scatterplot to save his life but could tell a Late Helladic bowl from a spacer sherd by the ring when you tapped it with a fingernail. We still used our eyes for most sorting, but the younger crew members trusted the machine readouts over their own hands by mid-season, which created a weird tension between generations that I haven't seen discussed much.