The classification of ancient pottery plays an important role in the field of archaeology. The classification of shape, material and color is used to relate a sherd to existing parts in the archive, thus the color information is important in the pre-classification process. In this work a color specification technique is proposed, which determines the color of specific regions of archaeological objects grabbed with a CCD camera. We explain how the acquisition system is calibrated in order to have a reference color system with respect to archaeological requirements. Experimental results are presented for archaeological objects and for a set of test color patches.