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That comment about broken pottery at the field school changed how I clean finds
I was scrubbing a Roman amphora sherd with a stiff brush last summer in York, and the supervisor told me I was probably removing surface residue that could show food traces. Now I only use soft brushes and water, and I bag everything separate for lab analysis. Has anyone else had their cleaning methods corrected by a more experienced archaeologist?
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tessa_murray1mo ago
Soft brushes are good and all but honestly I think people get a bit too precious with field cleaning. A stiff brush on Roman pottery is fine most of the time, the really important tiny stuff that gets lost is usually in the soil around it not on the surface anyway.
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ryan_barnes1mo ago
Right, the first time I tried a stiff brush on some Roman greyware I actually took the slip right off. Felt like a real genius holding a naked sherd with the decoration still sitting in the bristles. Now I keep a soft brush for the important stuff but use a toothbrush for most of the fieldwork. It's stiff enough to shift dirt but dumb enough to not do too much damage in my clumsy hands.
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hollyl251mo ago
Oh goodness, Tessa I have to disagree there. The whole point of field cleaning is to get the gross dirt off so you can see what you've got, but using too stiff a brush can absolutely ruin surface treatment or any faint decoration. I've seen it happen with Samian ware where the glossy slip just flakes right off if you're too aggressive. And that surface residue Ryan mentioned, that's not just about food traces either. Sometimes you get organic staining or even tiny fragments of textile or leather that are stuck to the pottery from whatever it was stored with. If you scrub those off with a stiff brush in the field, you've lost that evidence forever. The lab people can do microexcavation on dirt clumps and get way more information than we ever could with a toothbrush in a field tent.
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milam481mo ago
Oh man, the pottery cleaning debate is a classic. I remember reading an article a few years back about a site in Greece where they found microscopic fish scales stuck to cooking pot sherds. The archaeologist said if anyone had scrubbed those with a stiff brush they'd have just scraped off all the dietary evidence. Your supervisor was right to call you out, even if it felt harsh at the time. Soft brushes and bagging it separate is the way to go these days, especially if you want the lab to have anything useful to work with.
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