c. 900 to 1500 CE · Indigenousspan
Meillacoid pots are thin, incised, and never end a line in a dot
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Meillacoid pottery can be identified by hand. The walls are thin, four to six millimetres, and the paste is granular, firing reddish brown to orange brown. The decoration is cut into the surface with a narrow point while the clay is still soft, which pushes up a small ridge along each line, and that ridge is the signature. The motifs are geometric: crosshatching, oblique parallel lines, straight lines that stop where they stop and never terminate in a punched dot. Faces on the vessels are built by sticking the features on rather than modelling them out of the body of the pot. Handles are strapped on, and the ornamental lugs rise above the rim on opposite sides. This level of detail is not pedantry. Pottery is the main dating tool for a region whose people left no writing, so a sherd the size of a coin can place a site in a century and tie it to a whole network of communities making the same choices.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.