Solved a potsherd puzzle with a museum label in Santa Fe

Last month I was sorting through a dig box from a site near the Rio Grande and hit a wall with some unglazed sherds. They looked like plain utility ware but had these odd scoring marks on the inside. I kept turning them over for days, no luck. Then I took a photo into the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and a curator pointed out the match to a 1300s cooking jar type I had never even heard of. Now I check museum reference collections before I guess at any sherd, but I wonder how many other folks have had a similar breakthrough just by asking a specialist in person?

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evan29519d ago

My grandmother had a set of green glass salt shakers from the 1940s that nobody in the family could figure out. They had these tiny holes in the bottom instead of the top. I carried one around in my purse for two years before I happened to mention it to a guy at a flea market who collected Depression glass. He said it was a restaurant shaker meant to sit upside down in a holder so the salt stayed dry. I felt like an idiot but also kind of proud. Sometimes the answer is just a person who has seen one before, not something you can find online.