Munsell colour chart

Accurate colour description is extremely difficult, being so subjective. An objective scheme already much used for describing soils (in itself of interest to archaeology) and increasingly employed for pottery, is that devised by A Munsell. In this, three factors are assessed: hue ( the spectrum divided into ten colours, each subdivided into ten), value (the darkness or lightness of the colour, rated 0-10) and chroma (the greyness or purity of the colour, again rated 1-10). A colour can be matched with a set of charts and recorded as, for example, 5YR 6/3, so that anyone else with a set of charts can immediately find out the original colour without the ambiguity in some such description as ‘light brown’.