Dish washing time

My wife was watching a Time Team episode in which the archaeologists were looking at pottery fragments--pottery that had been tempered with bits of crushed pottery, leaving a surface that looked pretty ugly. But I guess it held up to heat OK.

Anyhow, the first thing that came to my mind was: how do you clean that? No soap, though you could scrub with ash. Or sand, but that'd be pretty abrasive, the more so if the surface is already uneven. Frayed stick ends would scrub pretty well.

This Facebook conversation proposes some things I'd never heard of before--such as seasoning the inside with starch, and that they may have had partial survivor's immunity to some of the diseases and so cleaning wasn't so critical. (Dunno about that last--cleaning your pots would give you an edge over the tribe that didn't, and in South America they devised thorough ways of getting the last cyanide out of their cassava--that last little edge is important.)

Cleaning up doesn't seem to get quite the same attention as hunting or fighting or fabrication or cooking. But without it...

Following up on the topic of cleanliness, I tried googling for indian longhouse chamber pot, and Google's AI hallucinated at me. I figure there had to be something customary, especially in large settlements like Cahokia.