Spent three whole days just trying to match a single pottery shard

I was working on a dig site in central Arizona, cataloging a bunch of broken ceramics from a small pueblo. One specific piece of painted pottery just would not fit with any of the other fragments we had. I must have sorted through that entire collection box three times over. Finally found its match in a box labeled for a different room of the structure, after like 72 hours of looking. Anyone else ever lose that much time on a single piece?

4 comments

4 Comments

nancyn692mo ago

Oh my gosh, yes, I feel this so hard! I once spent a whole week trying to find the other half of a carved bone needle. I was so sure it was in the midden pile we were working on. Turns out it had gotten mixed into a teaching collection back at the lab, a totally different project! The relief when you finally click it together is unreal.

torres.thea2mo ago

It's actually a midden, not a midden pile. The word itself means a trash heap, so saying pile is kind of repeating it. Finding a piece from a different site in the lab is the worst, but that moment when the edges match up makes up for all the stress.

jade5172mo ago

Spent a whole afternoon trying to fit a rim sherd that just would not go, feeling like a total failure. Finally realized it was from a different unit's bag, a total lab mix-up. Marksanchez might call that low-stress, but my whole sense of reality was shook until the pieces clicked. That sound is better than finding any keys.

marksanchez2mo ago

Okay but "the worst"? Come on, it's a piece of pottery. The stress is finding your keys when you're already late. Getting that worked up over a lab mix-up feels like maybe taking the job a little too serious.