Two pieces of broken burnt orange-coloured pottery with some decoration carved into them.

Pottery Analysis

One way that archaeologists can date different features and layers in the soil is by studying the objects that they find in each layer.

Pottery is especially useful for dating because archaeologists have studied it so much. An individual piece of pottery (sherd) can tell us a lot about how and when a site was being used.

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Three people at a table using water and brushes to clean Roman pottery finds.

Roman artefacts have to be cleaned before they can be assessed.

What happens after an excavation?

Studying and recording pottery finds can take a long time. For every week of excavation, it can take up to 3-5 weeks to clean, conserve and record all of the objects and features archaeologists have found.

A precise record of objects and features, including where they were found, is written up in a final excavation report. If archaeologists didn't make a careful record of their excavations, all of the valuable information they discovered about their excavation sites would be lost.

A man and a woman sitting across from each other at a table covered with documents.

Detailed descriptions of different pottery types are used to help identify finds.

How are finds organised?

Recording, or cataloguing, objects and conserving them starts with organising finds into types. Finds could be organised based on things like what objects look like or how they were used.

Important characteristics archaeologists look for in pottery includes its fabric (the colour of the clay and what it's made from), texture, design, size and how it was made.

A curved piece of pottery lined up with the curved bar-graph-style chart on a piece of a paper.

Archaeologists can calculate the original size of a pot by using a rim chart and the curve of a rim sherd.

How is pottery assessed?

Pottery specialists can often tell the shape and size of a pot from a single broken piece (sherd). If they have a piece of pottery from the rim of a pot (a 'rim sherd'), they can use a rim chart to work out how big the original pot would have been.