Yesterday I wrote a post about Pottery Washing. Tonight I will follow it up with a post about pottery reading.

Yesterday I mentioned that the pottery is collected in colorful buckets. I ended the post with a humorous picture of stacked pottery buckets. Tonight I decided to also share a picture of the pottery buckets in use. You can see that they are scattered throughout the squares. You will usually have multiple buckets in each square as you are saving pottery from different places.

 Yesterday we had a lot of pottery to wash. Here they are set out to dry before the pottery reading that we had to day.

You can see that some baskets of pottery have a lot of pieces and others have very few. It all depends on the size of the area that is being excavated and also how many sherds are being found.

Here you can see one of the two groups of archaeologist and staff processing or reading the pottery from the squares. They look for different features that allow them to tell the time period that the pottery is from. They are looking at the pottery from the area of the dig where we are. Most of the pottery is from the Late Bronze Age.

Here is the other group. Their finds are mainly from the Iron Age, so it is interesting to see the difference in the pottery styles.

I think that if I would have decided to be an archaeologist years ago that I might have focused on pottery. You need a good visual memory for this task.

Now for some sleep to get ready for the last two days of the dig.

4:15 comes very early in the morning.

Steven