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Date: | Thu, 28 Apr 2011 23:15:50 +0200 |
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I had meant to get back on this, but never had time. Overall I've never been
convinced by any method used to quantify "bits" of much of anything: NISPs
and so on in faunal or counting bits of pottery, and getting increasingly
skeptical as time goes on. I think what I mostly take issue with is context:
if I know how many pieces of pottery it doesn't tell me why there is more of
one type than another: it could be that one type was more fragile and easily
broken, or that one was primary and the other was secondary deposition, etc.
Some have tried to estimate the size of pots from broken sherds and somehow
estimate what percentage was represented, etc., but I think the only real
solution is somehow to compare volume of the pottery itself (so many cubic
cm of redware, so many cubic cm of blackware, etc.) and then compare these
to the volume of the context/layer/stratum from which they derive. As far as
I can see, that's the only way to make comparison, but then: how do you go
about measuring the volume of sherds? Maybe if we got laser scanning to be
cheap enough that we could do a quick 3D model of each sherd as it was being
processed...?
-----Original Message-----
Really....no responses....how strange....
Conrad
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