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TIL you can ID old pottery by the fingerprints left in the clay
I was on a dig near Santa Fe last summer and we pulled up a bunch of broken pot shards. One piece had a clear thumbprint pressed into the wet clay, and the lead archaeologist said you can match those to specific potters from the 1300s. We ended up linking that shard to a known Ancestral Pueblo site about 20 miles away. Has anyone else ever found fingerprints on artifacts that told you more about the maker?
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the_miles4d ago
Two of the shards we found had those deep swirl patterns from people's thumbs, and it was wild how the archies could tell left from right hand by the angle of the print. It's like how you can tell who's been drinking out of your coffee mug at work just by the lip smudge pattern. Those little marks are basically the same thing, just frozen in time instead of wiped off.
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