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Spent two months trying to match a single potsherd from a dig near Cusco

Found a piece of Inca-era pottery with a unique red slip pattern, but it didn't fit with any of our other finds from the site. Took me forever to realize it was from a different layer, likely mixed in by an old rodent burrow. Anyone else ever get thrown off by something that simple?
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2 Comments
kelly.robin
Seriously, you spent two whole months on one broken piece of pottery? It's just a rodent messing up the dirt, happens all the time.
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davidcooper
That fragment came from a sealed storage pit at the Tell es-Safi dig. If the rodent disturbance mixed layers from different centuries, the whole site's timeline gets messed up. Two months to sort that out actually sounds pretty fast. They're not just looking at dirt, they're checking what history got scrambled.
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