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A field tech in Colorado made me stop dry-brushing everything
I used to be so careful with fragile stuff, always using dry brushes for cleaning pottery shards we pulled from a site outside Fort Collins. This one tech, Rachel, pointed out that I was grinding micro-detail right off the rims and told me to switch to a damp, stiff-bristle toothbrush for the final pass. Tried it on a batch of 30 pieces last week and the incised lines are way crisper now. Anyone else get a similar correction on their cleaning method?
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viola_lopez3026d ago
Read about this exact thing in a museum studies blog a while back, they were saying dry brushing just pushes grit into the softer clay and acts like sandpaper. The damp toothbrush trick makes total sense to me now since the water kind of floats the loose stuff away instead of grinding it in. Good call on Rachel calling that out, those micro details are the first thing to go and you can't get em back once they're gone.
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