Spent two months trying to match a single potsherd from a dig near Cusco

Found a piece of Inca-era pottery with a unique red slip pattern, but it didn't fit with any of our other finds from the site. Took me forever to realize it was from a different layer, likely mixed in by an old rodent burrow. Anyone else ever get thrown off by something that simple?

3 comments

3 Comments

kelly.robin2mo agoMost Upvoted

Seriously, you spent two whole months on one broken piece of pottery? It's just a rodent messing up the dirt, happens all the time.

davidcooper2mo ago

That fragment came from a sealed storage pit at the Tell es-Safi dig. If the rodent disturbance mixed layers from different centuries, the whole site's timeline gets messed up. Two months to sort that out actually sounds pretty fast. They're not just looking at dirt, they're checking what history got scrambled.

paul_mason1219d ago

My uncle once spent three weeks trying to figure out why his garden shed was leaning sideways. Turns out a groundhog had burrowed under the foundation and the whole thing was sitting on a dirt mound. He dug it all up, leveled it, and then the next spring the groundhog came back and did it again. Some things just take time to untangle, especially when you're dealing with layers and critters. Two months for a pottery shard sounds about right when you think about what could be sitting underneath it.