The day a plow turned up 2,000 year old pottery in my uncle's field

Last spring my uncle was tilling a new section of his farm outside of Utica, New York and hit something hard. Turned out to be a cluster of broken Iroquois pottery shards, probably from around 1000 AD. The local college sent a grad student out who dated them at roughly 2,000 years old, which blew my mind since we just thought it was rocks. Has anyone else had a random discovery on private land change how they look at that spot forever?

1 comments

1 Comment

the_kim28d ago

Oh man, that is so cool! Something similar happened to my dad's cousin over in the Finger Lakes. He found a whole pile of arrowheads and what looked like old cooking pots just sitting in a washed out ditch after a big rainstorm. We spent the whole afternoon digging around with our hands, no tools or anything, like kids. That spot went from being this boring patch of weeds to this place that felt kind of magical. Every time I drive past it now, I always slow down and wonder who was standing right there thousands of years ago. It makes you realize the land has way more history than we ever give it credit for.