Brooks, Mouer, and Malan have stated the problem most astutely. Given
zillions of tiny refined tableware sherds, how do you concoct erudite
statements to justify your budget?
 
One of my clients loves artifact counts. Howard MacCord always reported the
cubic yards excavated. I suspect that minimum vessel counts belong to a
numerology in this category.
 
Industrially produced refined wares offer lots of new ways to count artifacts.
 
For example, it is fairly easy to distinguish "batches" of
industrially-produced fine ceramics. If the site occupants had a
predilection for blue shell-edge, how long did they keep buying it? You can
answer this by batching the shell edge sherds in chronological order.  This
can be done even with plowzone collections.  Creamwares exhibit many
different edge designs and sprigged decorations, as well as color and
thickness.  You can analyze changing preferences, the numbers of teawares,
the numbers of "sets" of teaware acquired over time, and so on and on.
 
What can the sherds tell you about the rate of diffusion of new styles?
Whole areas of commercial history, modernization, etc., etc., come to mind.
 
What I am suggesting is that there are quantitative approaches with real
cultural meaning, and there are non-quantitative or semi-quantitative ways
to interpret industrially produced fine tablewares from the eighteenth
through twentieth centuries.
 
We need to get beyond the minimum vessel counts, but sometimes they are a
pretty decent starting point.
 
 
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