Working on that Roman villa dig in Pompeii last summer totally changed how I look at pottery shards

I was part of a team digging near the House of the Faun, and we were finding tons of broken amphora pieces. My old habit was to just bag them by layer and move on, thinking the real story was in the walls or mosaics. But our lead archaeologist, Dr. Rossi, made us spend a full day just sorting one small pit's worth of ceramic fragments by color, thickness, and clay type. She said, 'The trash tells you what they ate, traded, and threw away.' It was tedious, but by the end we had mapped out trade routes from North Africa and Spain just from those broken pieces. Now I can't look at a pile of broken pottery without seeing a whole economic system. It made me realize we can miss the big picture by only chasing the flashy finds. Has anyone else had a dig where the 'boring' stuff ended up being the key?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow_martin5d agoTop Commenter

Ever sorted pottery until your eyes crossed? I did a field school in Greece where we had to count and weigh every single roof tile fragment. I thought it was the dumbest job on earth, just moving piles of red dirt from one spot to another. But the professor showed us how the tile weights proved different workshops supplied the city over time. Felt like a total idiot for complaining after that.

patking5d ago

Man that sounds like the worst kind of busy work at first. How long did it take before the professor explained the point of it all? I've totally been there, @willow_martin, just grinding through something that feels pointless. Honestly it's wild how the smallest, most boring detail can actually tell a huge story. Makes you look at everything differently after that.