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Actually, they don't...and I've seen them do it...date something just by looking at a piece of pottery (or artifact) that they find. It's not just simplified for the TV. They may try to corroborate it later on, but in general if they find something and think they recognise a "style" they may have found a date for previously, they go with that.
I'm very well aware of the various dating techniques, as you would imagine, and their pro's and con's. Yes, OSL would be the optimal way of dating things like pottery, and that would be the way I go about finding the dates for anything like pottery. Relying on "pottery analysis", as they define it, is not science. Dating something just on the basis of what style was in vogue at the time is fraught with problems. I'm not going to list them again, but there's even more that come to mind.
As for finding anything in context, you have to be very careful about the definition of context in any situation...as you can appreciate. In so far as any artifact found, I would be extremely careful about saying it was from this or that layer or whatever. Unless you have rock solid proof, you have no proof at all. Pottery and the like, settles in the soil profile, over time. I've seen stuff buried as far down as 2-4 metres in a soil eventually work its way to the surface, or go down a similar distance. If you look at the example I gave in my previous post....that is exactly the sort of problem that can crop up with dating "in context". You may find both objects in exactly the same context. But unless you had known about Wedgewood pottery from historic records, or had a good age determination done on hundreds of examples, you couldn't separate them. Yet clearly, the pottery (because we know so, from history) is 3 centuries older than the building. If you never had that precise dating done on the pottery, and only knew it from the "style", then you'd get it wrong. You might even find copies of that pottery elsewhere that may have been made at the time of the building, but that doesn't make it the same age as the bit you found...even though it's an copy of the original.
The system for 14C dating you're setting up in the lab sounds very interesting. I hope you manage to work out the teething problems.
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