Just got back from a dig in southern Turkey and the pottery shards are telling a different story

I was working on a site near the town of Antakya for about three weeks, helping to clear a new section of what we thought was a standard Roman-era settlement. We kept finding these really thin, high-fired ceramic pieces mixed in with the thicker, local Roman stuff. One piece I pulled out last Tuesday had a glaze color I've only seen in samples from much further east, like over 500 miles away. It makes me think the trade routes here were way more complex than the textbooks say, maybe even direct contact earlier than we've dated. The lead archaeologist keeps calling them 'stray finds' but there are too many to ignore. Has anyone else run into this kind of material mismatch that points to a bigger connection?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_holly18h ago

Did you see that paper last year about the pottery kilns near Aleppo? They found similar high-fired pieces there and argued for a small but steady trade network moving east-west way before the major Roman roads were built.

hugo3718h ago

Wait, they're still calling them stray finds? That's wild when you're pulling them out all the time. Honestly sounds like they just don't want to rewrite the site notes.