Since school has started I've been spending my spare time (which isn't much) volunteering at the Arizona State Museum. I work in the archaeological collections department, mostly organizing as during the move between buildings quite a lot of things have gotten mixed up. Also what you actually see in the museum is not even half of what the museum actually has. Its been collecting things since the 20s, and when you have that much stuff things can go astray fairly easily, and those things are easily put off. So things are a confusing mess. To make it harder, in the early days they didn't always keep the best of records so sometimes things don't quite match up, as was the case today.
So this was pulled for a pottery class. The piece itself was labeled as coming from Pompeii, they called it a Roman vase, and dated it to 79 CE (That's just the date of the eruption at Pompeii). Now that you know that lets take a step back. So I was readying these pieces for pictures, a collection of Roman, Greek, and Etruscan pottery, and matching printed labels with the correct pieces. But when I came across the Roman vase label, I couldn't for the life of me find the corresponding pot. My boss came and helped, and found this, the numbers matched, but the first words out of my mouth were, "That's not Roman."
Luckily my boss is awesome. So I explained what I believed it to be, looked up some examples online, and contacted my Greek Archaeology Professor to get her opinion. And, YAY, turns out I was totally right! This is a big difference. It makes this little pot about 600 to 700 years older than originally thought. Its a late ProtoCorinthian Aryballos. I recognized it by the shape, which is the biggest clue. But also there is a scale pattern below the handle (sorry it's hard to see in the picture). So there you have it, I've now used my knowledge of Greek Pottery outside of the classroom.
Haha, awesome! I hope to do an internship there in the spring. How's your semester going?
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