joelwells•2mo agoMost Upvoted

Spent 3 hours trying to date a pottery shard before realizing I was looking at a broken flower pot from the 1980s

I picked up this shard near a creek behind my house and swore it was prehistoric based on the temper, but after comparing it with local site reports and asking a guy at the state archaeology office, it turned out to be from a cheap planter my neighbor threw out 40 years ago. Anyone else waste time on modern trash thinking it's ancient?

3 comments

3 Comments

ross.felix2mo ago

The temper on modern flower pots can look deceivingly similar to some low-fired prehistoric wares, especially if there's a lot of sand mixed in with the clay. I've made the same mistake with a couple of pieces that turned out to be 1950s drainage pipe fragments. One thing I learned is to check for a uniform, machine-made color all the way through the break - the good stuff usually has a visible darker core from the firing process. Also, if the piece is completely straight or has a really sharp, perfect curve, it's almost certainly a modern machine-pressed item. At least you didn't spend a week trying to reconstruct the thing like I did once, that was a real bummer.

the_margaret1mo ago

Find myself noticing the same kind of thing in all sorts of old stuff now. Once you learn the little tricks for one thing, it starts popping up everywhere else, like how those machine marks on glass bottles are the same kind of tell as the perfect curves on pottery. It's funny how the modern world leaves its fingerprints on everything, even the junk we dig up.

parker_thomas2mo ago

I spent a whole afternoon once going through a box of old bottles I found in a barn, convinced I had a stash of 1800s soda bottles. Turned out most of them were from the 1970s, maybe even early 80s. What helped me was taking a close look at the manufacturing marks on the bottom - the seams on the glass were too perfect and the color was too uniform for old hand-blown stuff. I also checked a website called the Society for Historical Archaeology's guide to bottle dating, which has a chart of patent dates and mold seams. Kinda bummed me out at first, but now I just laugh about it and keep it as a reminder to look for those tiny details.