Is that new paint ivory, cream, or creamy beige? Describing colors is hard! Archaeologists use the standardized color chips in Munsell books to describe soil colors consistently. The books use a combination of letters and numbers to make a unique identifier for each color (for example, 10 YR 3/2). This makes for clearer and more consistent color recording than verbal descriptions such as “reddish brown” or “mousy brownish gray”–which can mean very different things to different people.
