My whole team got stuck for a week because of a single broken pottery shard

We were excavating a Roman villa site in southern France and found a piece of decorated Samian ware that looked totally normal, but our site director insisted we stop everything to re-grid the entire 5-meter square around it. It turned out to be from a completely different, much later period that had been moved by animal burrowing, so we wasted days documenting a false context. Has anyone else had a single small find derail their schedule that badly?

3 comments

3 Comments

josephmartin12d ago

Bag and tag as possible intrusion" sounds smart. Can't let one weird piece shut down the whole site.

milaw1412d ago

Honestly though, is a week really that big of a deal in the grand scheme? Tbh, stuff like that is just part of field work. Stopping for a weird find seems like the right call, even if it turns out to be nothing. I'd rather waste a few days being careful than miss something important because we blew past it. Your director was just doing their job.

craig.mila12d ago

Was it a rodent or a badger? We had a badger move a medieval coin into a Bronze Age layer once. Now we bag and tag anything that looks even a little out of place as "possible intrusion" right away, and keep digging. It saves a lot of time.