This week we will shift gears and look at the practical skill of pottery drawing. It is a stylized process that serves to extrapolate from the meagerest of sherds elements of what the whole vessel looked like. The main value of these drawings is there ability to facilitate comparisons between sherds and serve as an economical way to share data among specialists. It is part of the process of description and much like our discussions of categorizations it has a subjective side to it. Ultimately these drawings are a representation of reality. While they may reflect our ability to measure and catalogue, they are works of art, albeit of a very technical kind.
Questions to ask yourself:
Do these drawings allow you to see something new about a particular sherd? Are there things that they obfuscate?
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