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TIL that sorting pottery sherds from a single Roman site took me 8 months instead of 2
I joined a dig near Bath last spring and assumed classifying 4,000 pieces of Samian ware would be straightforward. But matching patterns to known kilns across Gaul ate up every weekend through autumn. Has anyone else had a classification project spiral way past your original estimate?
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faith_smith17d ago
Oh man, eight months for pottery is brutal! But here's something nobody's talking about - maybe the classification itself isn't what took so long, it's that we're still using methods from the 1800s to sort this stuff. I mean, we're basically staring at tiny scratches and going "yep that looks like a pot from Trier." Meanwhile every other science has fancy machines that could probably scan those sherds and match them to kiln databases in minutes. Not saying it would be perfect, but it might save someone from losing an entire year of weekends to broken dishes.
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Right, I spent three months matching medieval floor tiles once and by the end I was hallucinating patterns on my toast (not a good look at breakfast). Only thing worse than the time sink is the moment you realize you've been classifying by "vibe" for the last hour. Faith's got a point though, if they ever invent a pottery scanner I'll be first in line to donate my calloused thumbs.
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