Question about a broken Roman pottery piece from a dig near York

Took me nearly 3 hours to figure out which of 200+ fragments it matched up with. Anyone else ever get stuck on a single piece like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

marywilson3mo ago

I read somewhere that puzzle solving is a huge part of archaeology, so maybe it's just me but that sounds about right.

victorh813mo ago

So what kind of puzzles are we talking about, @marywilson? Is it just fitting broken pottery back together, or the bigger mystery of why a city was abandoned? You find one weird artifact in a layer of ash and suddenly you're trying to solve a thousand-year-old crime scene with no witnesses. That's a whole different level of puzzle.

the_wendy3mo ago

Used to think it was just pottery. Victor's right, it's detective work.

piperbailey1mo ago

The crime scene comparison is spot on, but here's what gets me. How do you even start connecting the dots when you find something like a seal or a coin from a totally different civilization in a layer where it doesn't belong? Does that mean trade, looting, or some kind of war tribute? A single object can flip the whole timeline of a site on its head, and you have to figure out if it got there by accident or for a reason the original people never wrote down. What's the weirdest out of place item you've heard about that completely changed what archaeologists thought was going on?