Pottery
I find alot of small pottery pieces in my ventures.
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Generally you can classify sea pottery into 3 different categories: earthenware, stoneware and porcelain. Determining more characteristics of time period is really dependent on how well preserved the piece is, if you can make out a design or a distinctive layering of the pottery and glazing it is easier to narrow it down. However most pottery shards I find lack this distinction.
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Earthenware The main distinguishing factor can be the weight (earthenware is much lighter, less dense than a rock). Earthenware is a clay substance, if you gently (gently being key word here) drop it on a tabletop it will make a more hollow sound than a rock which was the first thing I used to do when I first started finding them.
One form of earthenware that I find alot of is brick and terracotta. This is an easily distinguished due to the red coloring.
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Stoneware the easiest way to distinguish stoneware is its glaze, usually with a brown gloss with the inside resembling, you guessed it- a stone! You can tell if it's stoneware verse a rock because the glaze will have more "chippy" and raised edges while a rock's coloring blends itself into the stone, the stone is colored rather than a stoneware object having painted-on looking color.
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Porcelain Porcelain is the easiest to distinguish because well- its pretty! When you discover a porcelain piece, the density and thickness of it can be a distinguishing characteristic of time period. Pick up a mug from your house, you can see how perfect and flawless the fill and shape is, older pieces didn't generally have that thickness you see today, the pottery was more brittle and fragile. With older pieces, the fill was a bit more imperfect, while newer pottery has a very white and compacted inside.
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If this all interests you- visit the Shipwreck Museum:
