Just started "The Bible Unearthed"

[Minimalist]

Feel free to ask your questions.

How are archeologist able to split up the advancements in pottery technology? This makes sense to me how they use the pottery to date the dig site. But how are they certain that a certain advancement came about when it did? How would they be able to discern that a city wasn't using older methods due to lack of specific tools or a longstanding heritage?

You haven't asked a silly question yet.  This one is practically a degree field within archaeology however!  Books have been written on the subject. And, in fact, this one gives a fairly simple explanation of how it is done.  https://books.google.com/books?id=lefOg3...gy&f=false

In essence, they have been categorizing pottery for a century and a half as fashions and decorative motifs went in and out of style.  Thus, for example, if we find a Minoan pottery item in Luxor it is indicative of trade between Crete and Egypt, not that Egyptians suddenly started making Cretan pottery.

Below is a chart done by Israeli Archaeologist, Amihai Mazar, showing the similarities for decorative motifs between Mycenean and Philistine pottery.  This demonstrates that the Phiistines ( or Peleset, as they Egyptians called them) were ethnically Greek.  When an archaeologist excavating at Ashdod or Ekron finds a strata containing typically Canaanite pottery and right on top of that is a destruction layer and the layer above that contains pottery of a Philistine type it is pretty easy to see what happened.  The Philistines landed, overran the existing settlement and built their own on top of it.  The destruction layer will usually have enough organic material for c14 dating.  It is a puzzle and every site is unique with its own story to tell.