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I used to think pottery shards were boring until a dig in Ohio changed my mind
I always skipped the pottery sections in reports, figured they were just broken junk. Then I spent a day sorting sherds from a Hopewell site near Chillicothe and realized you can trace trade routes and daily life from the clay and temper. Has anyone else had a find that shifted their whole focus?
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johnson.lee9d ago
Right, because who needs boring old rocks and broken pots when you could be finding maybe one cool arrowhead every three weekends? Sure made me rethink my whole "shiny things only" policy though.
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karenw9010d ago
Picked up a bag of fire-cracked rock once thinking it was a waste of time (rookie mistake, I know) and ended up helping a grad student identify which stones were used for cooking versus tool-making near a riverbank in Kentucky. That single bag of rocks taught me how much daily life gets overlooked when you only chase the shiny stuff like arrowheads or ceremonial objects. Pottery's the same way - every scratch and chip tells a story about how people actually lived, not just what they buried with their dead. Makes you wonder what else we're missing by focusing on the "important" artifacts, doesn't it?
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