A grad student in Tucson showed me a broken pot sherd that changed my whole idea about trade routes

We were sorting through a box of material from a midden site, and she held up this little piece with a weird glaze. She said, 'This isn't local clay. Someone brought this up from Mesoamerica.' It made me realize how far stuff traveled even back then. Anyone else had a single artifact completely shift their thinking on a dig?

3 comments

3 Comments

emmag222d ago

My buddy found a Roman coin in a British farm field, totally rewrote the local site history.

hayden_nelson852d ago

That reminds me of a friend who tripped over a weird rock in a field in Cornwall. Turned out it was part of a medieval floor tile. Archaeologists got called in and found the outline of a whole forgotten chapel under the dirt. They had to change all the maps and guidebooks for the area. Just wild how one little thing can flip the script on what we think we know about a place.

chen.adam2d ago

Yeah, flipping the script like that is crazy. My cousin kicked a lump in his garden that was a carved stone from some old monastery wall.