ABSTRACT
This chapter presents little that is new, but it is hoped that it will make available to more archaeologists some ideas which are worthy of attention and suggest to them what should be expected in any pottery report as a minimum standard. The decision on which method of quantification to use is relatively easy for the research student who has a particular question to answer and chooses an appropriate method. Orton has considered the relative merits of some of the methods from a theoretical viewpoint. The work carried out on the pottery from the Romano-British farmstead at Elsted, Sussex examined the problem by quantifying the pottery using four different methods. The methods used were sherd weight, adjusted sherd weight, sherd count and minimum number of vessels. The most time-consuming method was that of adjusting the sherd weight to a standard thickness as a large number of calculations were needed.
