Jennifer Meanwell carefully placed a pottery sherd — or broken fragment of ceramic — under the circular, diamond-coated blade of a benchtop saw.“Cutting the sample is the first big step,” says Meanwell, a lecturer in the Department of Materials Science and Engineering at MIT. She was leading a lab in making thin sections of pottery for petrographic analysis, a method used to examine ceramics and determine their composition, structure, and origins.“You want a slice that’s thin enough to work with but thick enough to maintain its structure through the rest…
