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My niece asked me why we dig up old things and it got me thinking
Honestly, I was showing my 8 year old niece some photos from a dig I worked on in New Mexico years ago. She looked at a picture of a broken clay pot and just said, 'But why do you want it if it's broken?' Tbh, I gave her my usual answer about learning from the past. Then she said, 'But we already know people ate soup.' It hit different coming from a kid. I realized I'd been focusing so much on the big finds that I forgot the simple stuff. That little broken pot told us what plants they grew and how they cooked. It wasn't just about the soup, it was about their whole day. Has anyone else had a simple question make you rethink why you got into this field?
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gracethomas10d ago
Kids have a way of cutting right to the heart of things! I once had a visitor at a site ask why we were so excited about a pile of dark soil. Explaining it was a trash pit full of animal bones and seeds felt silly until I said it was like finding someone's grocery list from a thousand years ago. That changed their whole face. It's not the object itself, it's the story of the person who dropped it. Your niece is onto something big.
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owens.blair10d ago
Worry that story is all we look for now. Saw a perfect flint blade in a museum last week, labeled only with "used for cutting." But the skill to make it, the way the force travels through the stone... that's a story too, just not a human one. We get so caught up in the grocery list we forget the hand that wrote it, and that hand was shaped by the rock and the weather. The object itself has a lot to say.
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