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Shoutout to that volunteer dig leader who noticed the pottery sherd I nearly stepped on
I was out on a community excavation in eastern Colorado last summer, just doing surface survey stuff. We had maybe 15 people spread out across this dry field, mostly novices like me. Around hour three I was getting kinda bored and not really paying attention. Then the dig leader, an older guy named Dave, stopped me and pointed at this tiny piece of reddish clay half buried in the dirt. He said most people would walk right past it. I bent down and picked it up, turned it over. It had these faint corrugated lines on the inside. Dave told me it was probably from a prehistoric cooking pot, maybe 800 years old. That little sherd ended up being one of the only decorated pieces from that whole grid. I still keep it on my desk at home. Has anyone else found a small artifact that ended up being more significant than you thought?
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sageross17d ago
Holy cow, Dave sounds like the kind of guy who could spot a single Cheerio in a pile of gravel from 50 feet away. I've never found anything that cool but I did once pick up a rock that I was convinced was a fossilized dinosaur tooth. Turns out it was just a weird looking piece of driveway gravel that had been through a lawnmower. So I guess my artifact was definitely less significant than I thought, unless you count "confirmation that I have zero archaeological instincts" as a meaningful discovery.
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patricia_green2117d ago
Hear that, Dave sounds like he's got some serious pattern recognition skills. That's a skill that takes years to develop though, right? So what exactly was it about that sherd that caught his eye? The color, the way the light hit it, or just the shape being too regular to be a random rock? I'm curious if he explained his process to you in the moment or if he just pointed and said "look there.
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