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November 03, 2006

Friday Pot Blogging

I thought it might be fun to look at a piece of a pot, a potsherd, to see what we can learn. While whole pots are sometimes found in excavations, it is far more common to find potsherds. The one pictured below is a rather large sherd.

This sherd is from the pottery dump at Gezer. It was collected in circa 1970. I'll discuss how things end up in a pottery dump at an excavation later in this post. For now, I want to focus on the sherd itself. To give you an idea of proportions, the circular base is a little over 9 cm in diameter. Dever, et al, published a very similar base in Gezer IV, II, plate 14, #3. The pottery illustrated on this plate are from Field 6, Gezer Stratum 7. The illustrated pot is a bowl and I think it likely that the sherd pictured above is also from an almost identical bowl. Without the rim, it is hard to be absolutely certain that these are the same style pots. As I will show in a while, there is even a commonality in manufacturing technique beyond both being wheel made and about the same size. If this sherd is indeed like the Gezer Stratum 7 bowl then it can be dated alone with the whole pottery assemblage from that stratum to the middle of the Iron II period. In other words, 840/830 BCE to 732/701 BCE using Mazar's recent suggestion. It is likely from the earlier half of this third of this period.

Take a closer look at the broken edge of the sherd. Notice that it is gray in the middle. Not surprisingly, this is called "gray core" and it is the result of incomplete firing. I turns out that not only the pot base illustrated in Gezer IV, plate 14, #3 but a very high percentage of large pots from this period at Gezer (and elsewhere) have gray core. Of course, under firing is common in other periods also but it is one additional piece of evidence for placing this sherd in the same family and period as others.

How does a sherd like this one end up in an excavation's pottery dump? There are two possibilities. First, it was known at the time it was excavated that it was out of context and there was no way to restore its archaeological context. . For example, if the excavators needed to work their way through the excavation dump of a previous dig (One of RAS Macalister's many dumps in the case of Gezer) and a sherd like this was found in that material, unless it was truly distinctive, its archaeological value would be minimal. The second reason may come as a shock to many readers who may have worked on or read about New World excavations. At many New World sites a sherd like this would be cause for celebration not to mention much speculation. But at a large scale excavation like the Joint excavation at tell Gezer in the Lavant, literally thousands of sherds are found each day. Every day the field archaeologists "read the pottery." They have three goals in mind as they do this. The first is to assure that the excavated locus from which these sherds came was "clean" and the excavation is under control. By "clean" I mean that the locus is not contaminated by sherds from later periods. If so, the field excavator likely missed something: a pit, a trench, or something else intruding from a later period. It which case, the cause of the contamination needs to be identified and isolated. This is a kind of quality assurance effort. Second, the archaeologists want to get a day to day idea of what loci are important and how they relate chronologically to each other. Third, the archaeologists want to decide what to keep for more detailed study, what to keep for statistical reasons and what to throw away. The decision to throw a sherd away is made on a number of grounds. In the case of undecorated sherds from the body of a pot very little can be learned and so such sherds are often thrown away. Also, in general, bases are not as diagnostic as rims. If a base sherd, like the one under discussion in this post, is but one of many of the same general type from the same or closely related loci then it may well be thrown away also. Below is a picture of the Gezer pottery dump.

You can see the piles of discarded sherds on either side of the steps going up to where the pottery was read. I think I took this picture in 1970 but it could have been a year of so later. By the way, the buckets that can be seen in this picture were used to collect the pottery in the field. Each excavation locus was assigned a well labeled pottery bucket. Sometimes a locus would produce only one or two sherds and that was all that went into that bucket. But sometimes a locus would produce hundreds of sherds, on occasion several buckets full. In case you were wondering, a locus is any identifiable unit under excavation. A wall (yes, sherds are sometimes found inside stone or brick walls), the founding trench for that wall, a pit or each identifiable layer of fill within a pit, a lens of ash or a domestic surface are all examples of separate loci.

Whole or restorable pots are never discarded nor are sherds that can be joined to restore partial pots. This is why the archaeologist never makes a decision to discard even a single sherd until he or she has looked at every sherd from a given locus. At the time, the Gezer excavation was at the leading edge of field methodology. I believe more sherds are kept today because of an increased and proper interest in statistical analysis of the pottery assemblies.

Update: November 4, 2006
There is now a general table of contents to this series.

References:

Posted by DuaneSmith at November 3, 2006 10:41 AM | Read more on Archaeology |

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