Like many archaeological field projects working in the Aegean region, the post-Bronze Age team at Troia has assembled a substantial study collection of Greek, Roman and Byzantine pottery. In addition, over the course of more than a decade of publication, a large number of sherds has been cataloged. As a result, the project maintains an extensive archive of sherd descriptions, profile drawings and photographs. This digital publication is assembling this information with the purpose of making it widely accessible. Currently, only a small fraction of the total material is presented here.

Many of the sherds now available come from the study collection, which was started by Susan Rotroff and subsequently assembled under the direction of Billur Tekkök. Many project members have contributed more or less brief descriptions of the sherds in the collection and some of those appear here with only minor editing. When descriptions closely quote already published articles, this is indicated by the phrase "First published as..." with a linked reference to the printed work. In these instances, the original articles remain the primary publication and should be cited directly. Some sherd descriptions being published here are drawn from works-in-progress and full bibliographic information will be added in the future.

The editors have chosen to release this document as a public draft because we believe its content is already useful and because we hope to solicit comment. The main drawback is that many of the catalog entries are in the process of being edited. This is balanced by the decision to work towards making available the same quality of information for each entry as has been recorded by the project. Currently, it is the color photography that best shows the benefits of this approach. When detailed digital images exist, these can be viewed at their original resolution, as well as at a smaller size for faster downloading. High quality profile drawings are also included where possible. We welcome feedback and hope that readers will recognize that we are steadily adding individual entries, as well as details and visual documentation for existing entries, and, in particular, are building up the bibliographic component of the publication as a whole.