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Unpopular opinion: maybe we shouldn't date pottery by style alone
I was helping a buddy dig a test pit near Santa Fe last weekend and we pulled a shard that looked exactly like a classic Anasazi design from 1100 AD. But the dirt layer around it had a piece of 1800s bottle glass mixed in from a rodent burrow, so now I'm wondering how many museum pieces are dated wrong. One side says style is reliable because potters didn't change much over centuries, the other says we've got too many examples of later copies and reuses. What's your take, have you ever seen a site where style and carbon dating didn't line up?
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patp791mo ago
You ever hear about my buddy who dug a Hohokam site near Tucson? He found a bowl that looked like classic red-on-buff from 900 AD, but when they carbon dated some organic gunk stuck to the rim, it came back 1400s. Turns out someone in the 1300s had dug up an old bowl and reburied it with new offerings. So now every time I see a museum label saying "definitely dated by style" I get suspicious. Style can hold steady for centuries, but people have been looting and reusing old pots forever, so who knows what's really original.
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wendy_bell831mo ago
That carbon dating trick is clever but one weird bowl doesn't prove the whole system is broken. Museums have thousands of pots that match up just fine with context and stratigraphy, so a single reburial is more of a cool footnote than a crisis. It's interesting but not really worth getting worked up over, you know?
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