My team just cataloged over 10,000 pottery shards from a single trench

We were digging a small Roman villa site in southern Spain and the count just kept climbing. It matters because it totally changes our view of how much trade was happening there, way more than the old records said. Has anyone else had a find that made them rethink a whole site's story?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_viola27d ago

That's so cool. I mean, sometimes it's not even the big number, but what the pieces are. We had a site everyone said was just local stuff, but then a bunch of us found these tiny, specific amphora bits from way north Africa. It wasn't just trade, it was like, someone's very specific wine or oil order getting shipped way out there. Makes you wonder about the people buying it.

west.miles26d ago

My friend was digging a test pit in what looked like a normal field in Suffolk. They pulled up a single, perfect Roman coin from the reign of some minor emperor. Then they found another. And another. They ended up with over two hundred coins from that one small hole, all from the same short time period. It wasn't a lost purse, it was a deliberate stash, like someone buried their savings and never came back. Makes you picture that person hiding their money and then something bad happening, you know?

troysmith27d ago

Yeah my buddy was working on what they thought was just a small farmstead up in Scotland, and then they hit this huge midden full of animal bones. The type and cut marks showed it was way more of a meat processing hub than anyone guessed, like supplying a nearby fort they didn't even know was there. It totally flipped the script on that whole valley's economy. Finds like that are wild, when one trench just blows up the old story.