The Great Secret of Pottery Shards

I asked Mark to send me a photo of the diagnostic pottery (so one could see handles, rims, and bases), but instead he sent me this photo of a partial oil lamp! Oh well, you get the idea.

Only rarely does a volunteer make a big “find” of gold amulets (like Linda Miller in 2005) or an inscription (we’re still waiting for this one at the NE Church) or the tomb of a woman in the chancel. For most of us lowly volunteers, our daily finds consist of pottery shards, fragments of glass, and animal bones. As one of the eager, first-time volunteers who opened square F4 during the first week on the job, I was disappointed that we did not keep our pottery shards from the first day. The top section of soil was too disturbed, I was told by Head Honcho Mark; we would begin recording our finds the next day. We all learned “the rule of thumb” for discerning whether or not to keep a pottery shard: if it was bigger than one’s thumb, it’s a keeper! And so we religiously followed the rule that first week. But the lower we got in our square, the more numerous were the shards. Soon Jessica was reminding us when the rule of thumb (which grew to the size of a gorilla’s thumb then King Kong’s) was in question, “Think about whether or not you want to wash that shard this afternoon.” Not only did we start thinking of the tedious job of daily pottery washing, we also all became conscious of the fact that someone working in our square would be asked to carry our bucket of pottery down the rocky, uneven, half-mile trail to the bus. The heavier the bucket of shards, the uglier a job it became.

But even an amateur archaeologist like me knows the importance of pottery for dating the time period of a given site, and so we continued to be diligent in our pottery collection and daily washing. I learned it was more important to clean the edges rather than the front or back of pottery shards—odd, that (so one can see the types of clay and amount of glaze I’m told). After the evacuation of the students (which included Pottery Queen Stephanie Randolph and Crown Princess of Pottery Tabitha Cook), I discovered even more about the processing of the pottery after washing. I helped Linda Miller, crowned Pottery Queen after Stephanie and Tabitha’s unwitting abdications via evacuation to the USA. I quickly learned that pieces with handles, rims, and bases were separated from the other shards and cataloged by type (basically, they were separated into everyday dishes or pots and “fine china”—technically, “fine ware”); the rest of the shards (no sections of handles, rims, or bases) were merely weighed, counted, and placed in a separate bag that included the date, square number, and locus (the depth of the square).

During the last week, Yolanta, one of the Polish archaeologists came to “read” our pottery; that is, she examined the so-called diagnostic pottery—the pieces of handles, rims, and bases. One of her conclusions: the NE church (our site) is older than the “Polish church” (the one the Polish team has been excavating). Our church may date back to the fifth century, that is, the age of the Councils of Ephesus and Chalcedon (431 and 451, respectively) when the church was hammering out language for the incarnation. The earlier dating put me in awe of our work.

My work on the pottery continued on my final day of recovery from that nasty intestinal bug. I stayed behind at the kibbutz but worked most of the morning photographing the diagnostic pottery—first one side of the shards of handles, rims, and bases from each square and each day, then the other side. Then Mark and I boxed them up and prepared them to be sent to him in the US by Michael, the assistant archaeologist of the Haifa team. The real surprise came with Mark’s instructions to me regarding the rest of the shards: all those pieces (the vast majority) which came from part of the pots other than handles, rims, and bases. Once carefully kept separate by square, locus, and date, I was shocked, shocked, to learn the great secret of pottery shards: They were now all mixed together in the pottery buckets, hauled back up to the dig site, and dumped over the side of the hill with other rubble excavated from the site! But wait! We so carefully saved them, carried them down the hill, soaked and scrubbed them, weighed and counted them . . . only to have them mixed up and returned to the site as junk! On the one hand, I was glad I hadn’t known the fate of all those shards as I collected and washed them throughout the four weeks. On the other hand, I wish I had slipped a couple of the nice pieces into a sock and brought them home. Had I known the great secret of the pottery shards, I might have taken the risk and become a smuggler of antiquities.