Why are there so many pottery sherds at Anasazi archaeological sites?
You have to keep in mind a number of points. First, trash piles once consisted of all kinds of junk, but much of it decayed over the years so that now all we see are the “hard” things such as pottery. And, second, these trash piles were accumulated over many, many years. Imagine that a cliff dwelling was lived in by two families, each with 8 members. Just through cooking and storing and moving pots to and fro, each person had to have broken at least one pot per year, and probably more (imagine carrying the pots up and down the cliff constantly to get water). That’s a total of 16 pots per year, and let’s say that each ultimately broke into 50 pieces, for a total of 800 pieces per year. After a couple of generations of occupying the same site, you’d have 40,000 pieces!! And that would be a relatively small cliff dwelling.
