TIL that old pottery shards can tell you more about ancient trade routes than any textbook

I was helping a friend sort through a box of stuff from a dig in New Mexico and found a piece of pottery with a type of glaze that shouldn't have been there. It was a black-on-white design, but the mineral composition matched a kiln site over 200 miles away near Taos. We looked it up and apparently that pattern shows up in like 3 different regions from the same time period. Has anyone else stumbled on a find that totally flipped what you thought you knew about local history?

2 comments

2 Comments

skyler432d ago

Man, that's wild! My buddy down in Austin was going through some old stuff from a creek bed near his place and found a piece of green-glazed pottery from the 1800s. He didn't think much of it until a guy from the local historical society looked at it and said the glaze was a type they only used in a small factory in Ohio. That factory mostly shipped stuff west, not south. So it flipped the whole idea that all trade came from Mexico or the Gulf back then. Made me wonder how many little pieces like that are just sitting around in people's garages.

olivia_harris192d ago

Wait, so the green glaze was from a specific Ohio factory? Did the historical society guy say how common that glaze was or if other pieces from that factory showed up down south?