Spent 8 months trying to ID a pottery sherd from my dig in Arizona

I pulled this weird little piece of pottery from a site near Tucson back in March. It had this odd spiral pattern I couldn't match to any of the usual Hohokam or Salado types. I sent photos to three different archaeologists, flipped through about 20 books, even asked on a Facebook group. Finally last week a retired professor from the University of Arizona looked at it and said it was just a modern kiln reject from the 1930s - some rancher's trash pile. Has anyone else spent way too long chasing a dead end like this?

2 comments

2 Comments

riley5953d ago

Eight months seems about right for realizing you spent all that time analyzing someone's Depression-era ashtray.

derekwalker3d ago

Man oh man, you hit the nail on the head there. It's funny how we'll spend months digging into some random object like it's gonna unlock some deep mystery, and then one day you just look at it and go "well that's just a dirty old ashtray." I've been there with a few things from the thrift store, convinced I found something special only to realize it's worth maybe five bucks on a good day. The whole online community for this stuff is addictive though, you get sucked into the research and the history behind it and before you know it half a year is gone.