Hot take: I think we are too quick to date pottery by style alone

I tried matching a set of sherds from a site in Missouri to a known type chart last month, and every piece came back wrong compared to the radiocarbon results. It taught me that decoration changes faster than we assume, so has anyone else gotten misled by relying on visual typology?

2 comments

2 Comments

xena_kim20d agoProlific Poster

Heard a buddy of mine from a dig in Kentucky tell a similar story, he was dead set on these shell-tempered sherds being from a late Woodland context but the radiocarbon came back solidly into the Early Ceramic period. @rosek44, it’s wild how much our assumptions about decoration can get in the way, especially when you’re staring at a mismatch that makes you second-guess everything you thought you knew. The local clay sources and firing practices probably mess with how things look over time way more than the charts account for.

rosek4420d ago

Oh man, been there! Spent a whole summer convinced I had an early woodland site until the carbon dating basically laughed in my face. Nothing like staring at a box of "clearly" Mississippian sherds that turned out to be way older.