Recently I stumbled upon an interesting site and the particular article dealt mostly with ancient broken pottery found on site. Most pottery and earthenware fragments are very small, -the size of your thumbnail being very common. Larger fragment were the size of your open hand but these are rare.

Unbroken pottery is exceedingly rare and of great importance as these often define how particular vessels looked. It can be difficult to reconstruct a clay pot from thousands of fragments let alone not even knowing that the finished unbroken form was supposed to look like.

In archeology, broken earthenware are called “potsherd” or “sherd” for short. I had seen this strange word before, “sherd,” and had assumed it was either a corrupt spelling of “shard” as in “a shard of glass” but no, the word is correct.

A “sherd” or “potsherd” in an archaeological dig is the more correct term. A “shard” on the other hand refers more specifically to fractured pieces glass or ceramic, but the two words are interchangeable in common usage.

Interestingly, broken potsherd was not the end of useful life for broken pottery. Throughout history, broken pottery was often recycled as a writing tablet for both important and unimportant notes, text and events. A potsherd with writing transcribed upon it is called “ostracon.” These serve witness to the daily events and affairs of ancient people and are often deemed for accurate than the preserved text of the scholarly of the day, for these are often inscribed by the common people and reflect their day-to-day doings.

Bills, receipts, trade agreements, -everyday notes could be inscribed upon these potsherd and it is these ostracon that often help to validate a site’s age and authenticity by the mundane references made. Trade routes between cites could be established by finding these ostracon in different cites indicating that commerce and other exchanges were made.

Casting Ostracon

Image via Wikipedia (an ostracon)

In ancient Greece, these broken earthenware potsherd (ostracon) were also re-purposed as voting ballots. In Athens, a person of undesirable qualities or ill-repute could by popular vote be exiled from the city for a period of 10 years. Inscribed with the name of person being voted upon, these ostracon would be collected and counted.

If the vote was unfavorable, the person was exiled as their form of societal democratic punishment. This process is the origin of the modern-day word “ostracism” and now you know the rest of the story…