Today was our first day working with the pottery from Polis. There are not many people working on material this summer at Polis. Right now there are only 4 people present at Polis, but by the end of the summer there will be around 10. On the bright spot, that means there is a lot of room to spread out and work with the pottery. I have a couple of things I always do when I am analyzing or reading pottery. The main one is that I always listen to music. I think for me, this goes back to when I first started learning about ceramics, my advisor (Tim Gregory) always had a radio on while we worked. I did notice last year in Polis that everyone in the apotheke had music to listen to, so this is certainly not unusual. For me, though, it helps me focus on what I am doing and tune out distractions. It also helps keep me moving ahead when I am facing of large tray of pretty boring pottery. My music choices are …… eclectic, I guess. Most (not all) of the music I like to listen to comes from the 80’s when I was in high school and college. I am sure that if you constructed a Venn diagram of my music and Bill Caraher’s music, there would be a very small intersection – tiny. Anyway, for the ceremonial reading of the first pottery sherd of the season, I chose Motley Crue’s “Home Sweet Home.” For the record, the first sherd was a Late Roman roof tile sherd – not terribly exciting. We did not find many interesting sherds today, the levels we looked at were composed mainly of roof tiles. It was only in the last few minutes of our work day that we finally opened some boxes that contained Late Roman fine wares. We are going to pick up there tomorrow.
RSM
Ancient History Ramblings 