Pottery Puzzle

This is the display of just 2 weeks of excavation. We would average about 10 buckets of pottery a day. Once the pottery was washed by our pottery washing team we would separate the body shards from the diagnostic pieces (handles, bases and rims). You will notice that on the table nearest you are the various handles many of them with the rim still intact. We separated the diagnostics and shards to see if we could find some mendable pieces (my wife is holding one of them). We did manage to put many pieces together like a giant jig saw puzzle. From this selection we choose the publishable which are registered and later published in the official pottery book on Roman and Byzantine pottery. The pottery from the Bronze and Iron age are read separately pail by pail. It took the team an entire day to read the pottery from the rest of the dig. The Roman building we are excavating was backfilled by local farmers over the years so the pottery was mixed and therefore there was no logical stratification in our area. The Roman pottery was on the top of the Byzantine and Umyyad. To read the balk in our area one would have to stand on their head. Glen (at the end of the table in the photo) has a patch over his eye because of an eye problem he acquired while in Jordan, not from looking at all the pottery. :-)