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TIL you can date old pottery just by looking at the tiny grooves on the inside
I was helping a buddy clean out his grandpa's barn last weekend and we found a bunch of old clay pots. One looked really old, like Native American old. So I did some digging online and learned that those little spiral marks inside are from how the potter coiled the clay. Turns out the width and spacing can give you a rough date range. The pot we found has these thin tight coils that apparently match the Woodland period around 500 AD. Never would have guessed that. Has anyone else used this trick for dating stuff they found?
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hunt.nora2mo ago
Thought the whole dating pottery thing was just archeologists guessing for fun until I saw the coil method explained step by step online. It actually makes total sense when you realize how potters changed their techniques over hundreds of years. Now I'm itching to go look at any old clay stuff I can find with totally fresh eyes.
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Check the clay's temper material too, sand or crushed shell can narrow down both region and era.
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cameronf882mo ago
That thing about the coil method really hit me too lol. I spent a whole weekend once trying to learn how to tell old pottery from newer stuff just by looking at the bottom of a broken piece. What worked for me was actually finding a local creek bed near an old farm and digging up some broken shards myself. I used a simple magnifying glass to look at the temper, like you mentioned with the sand or shell. Once I saw the difference between the gritty stuff and the smoother modern clay, it was like a lightbulb went off. Matching the coil thickness and the temper type to old photos online got me super into it real quick.
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