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My neighbor's kid asked if we ever find dinosaur bones at our dig site
I was telling him about the Roman pottery shards we're cataloging from a site near York, and he looked so disappointed. He said, 'But pottery is just old plates, that's boring.' It made me realize how much we take the small finds for granted. What's a simple artifact that you think gets overlooked but tells a great story?
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sammartinez5mo ago
Pottery shards are way more than old plates, man. They show trade routes from the fingerprints in the clay, or what people ate from the soot marks. A kid's thumbprint on a piece made two thousand years ago beats a dinosaur bone for me, because it's a direct link to a real person. That stuff makes the past feel alive in a way big bones sometimes don't.
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rowan_reed685mo ago
Honestly, my own thumbprint on a coffee mug is probably my most lasting artifact.
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ivan_harris2mo ago
That's fair, and I get the appeal of a kid's thumbprint or a worn bead. But here's where I push back a little. The sheer size of a dinosaur bone, even a fragment, forces you to reckon with time in a way pottery never can. You hold a piece of a femur and your brain just shuts down trying to imagine the creature that owned it, walking around millions of years ago. Pottery shards are human stories, sure, but dinosaur bones are earth's history, way before us. To me, that's not less alive, it's a different kind of alive, one that puts our whole species in perspective.
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brian_taylor155mo ago
Check the wear on a simple stone bead. Shows how often someone touched it, maybe for comfort or prayer.
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