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Last Tuesday I found a 200 year old pipe stem at a dig site
I was volunteering on a colonial site dig outside Richmond and during the afternoon shift I pulled this tiny clay pipe stem fragment out of a test pit. It had a maker's mark on it that matched records from the 1820s, which was wild because everything else we found that day was just nails and broken glass. Has anyone else had a lucky find that totally saved a slow dig day?
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wendyg4317d ago
Three out of four field volunteers I know have found nails and broken glass their whole weekend, and they're thrilled because it means the site hasn't been stripped by looters. You got a tiny pipe stem with a maker's mark, and now you're acting like the site is ruined? Slow dig days are the bread and butter of archaeology, not some kind of punishment you need saving from. If every test pit delivered a museum piece, we'd never learn about the boring everyday stuff that tells us how people actually lived. Your lucky find is fine, but it doesn't mean the nails and glass were a waste of time.
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I totally get what you're saying about slow days being part of the process. On one dig I did, we spent three days only finding coal chunks, and the team's patience paid off when one of those chunks turned out to be from a rare 1700s forge. It made me realize that boring stuff can be just as important for telling the full story of a site.
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