Day 13, June 22nd

Day 13, Friday June 22

Today the entire group was at the pottery compound.  We worked all day on sorting tons of backlogged pottery.  It was a pretty simple task and it was nice that I wasn’t working alone.  Everyone was pretty bored but I was just happy to be a part of the group and to be working with people.  Basically, we were sorting diagnostic pieces from body pieces and discarding the body pieces.  Diagnostic pieces (Diags for short) are pieces that can be used to help determine something about the vessel.  Any rims, edges, bottoms, and handles are considered diagnostic pieces.  In addition, any pieces with decoration were also set aside.  Due to the sheer number of pieces that we had, the body pieces needed to be discarded just to help reduce the number of crates in storage.  At the end of the day we had something like 110 discard crates and 70 crates of diag pieces.

Side note, I remember talking with Gus one time about geology.  He was telling me about how the geology department at UMD had set a box of beautiful rocks up outside of the department to give them away.  Someone told him about them, so he went to go check it out.  He found out that the geological samples had no data connected to them, and therefore no context.  That is why the geology department was discarding them, because without context they were entirely useless.  Gus didn’t end up taking any of them because they were of no interest to him without the context.

The reason that I am writing about that is because the same applies to certain pieces of pottery.  We found several bags that had no labels associated with them.  In addition, none of the pieces were marked.  It seemed so sad to throw out some of the pretty stuff that we found, but it was completely useless without the context.  There was one beautiful white piece with markings in it, and a handle on one side with a rim.  But, it was unmarked and useless.  Sad face.