Loading…
17
Spent 3 months reading site reports from looters instead of the real dig journals, and the difference was night and day
Back in March I got hooked on those YouTube videos where guys with metal detectors pull Roman coins out of farm fields in England, so I spent most of my free time watching those instead of reading the actual published excavation reports from the same areas. When I finally sat down with the real site journals from a dig near Hadrian's Wall, I noticed the detectorists never mentioned the pottery shards or soil layers that told you where the coins actually came from. Doesn't the context matter more than the find itself, or am I missing why people get so excited about the object alone?
1 comments
Log in to join the discussion
Log In1 Comment
river_allen8d ago
The pull of the object alone makes total sense to me even if I care about the dirt more. A coin in your hand is a thing you can hold, it has a face and a date and it survived two thousand years, that feeling is real and it hits people hard. But you're right that without the soil layers and the pottery, that coin is just a cool trinket with no story about who dropped it or why. The dig journals give you the boring stuff that turns a find into actual history, like whether it was buried under a floor or tossed in a ditch. The detector guys skip that part because their whole channel is about the thrill of the beep, not about what the dirt is saying. Both things can be true, the object gets you in the door and the context is what keeps you there.
1