Appreciation post: Working on that Bronze Age site in Cyprus completely changed how I see 'simple' pottery shards.

After spending a week meticulously mapping a single broken pot's pieces across a 2-meter square, I now understand that every fragment tells a specific story about trade and daily life, not just 'old stuff', so what's the most mundane artifact that actually taught you something huge?

3 comments

3 Comments

sean_walker451mo ago

My undergrad dig found a single fish vertebra that rewrote the local diet timeline.

andrew8541mo agoMost Upvoted

That's wild how one small find can change everything. It must have been crazy to hold that piece of history. What kind of fish was it?

jason52419d ago

That's the thing with fish vertebrae, they're tough little bastards. They survive way better than mammal bones in a lot of soil conditions. If you're digging a site with old food waste, fish bones are gonna be your best bet for figuring out what people actually ate. Just make sure you have a reference collection of local fish skeletons to compare against. I've seen people misidentify a catfish spine as a bird bone before because they didn't take the time to look at the joint surfaces closely. A good hand lens or a cheap digital microscope will save you from making that mistake. Once you get good at telling them apart, you can spot diet shifts just by the size and species mix across layers.