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POTTERY FROM THE GROUND
OUT
When you visit archaeologists at work in the Middle East, you quickly notice that they seem obsessed with pottery, even broken bits of pottery that they call "sherds," which seem to appear everywhere across an ancient site. It is easy for the casual tourist exploring deserted ruins to overlook these seemingly unimportant fragments of broken clay vessels and focus instead on the remains of ancient buildings, or skeletons of the people who lived there, or mostly the beautiful gold and silver artifacts that might have been retrieved there. To be sure, archaeologists are also interested in these spectacular finds, but pottery has a special place in their work, even to the point that one may safely say that it dominated archaeology of the ancient Near East in the twentieth century and continues to do so today, though the methods of studying pottery are increasingly more scientifically advanced.
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Last Updated on
10/25/2002 08:49 AM
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