Found my first intact pot in the field yesterday, after two years of just shards

We were digging a test pit near the old mission in Santa Barbara, and my trowel hit something round instead of flat. It was a whole cooking pot, about the size of a soccer ball, just sitting there in the soil layer from the 1700s. My hands were shaking so much I almost dropped it (which would have been a real disaster). Has anyone else had that moment where you finally find something complete after so many broken pieces?

3 comments

3 Comments

davidyoung1mo ago

Two years for one pot seems like a long time to wait for a win. I get the excitement, but it's just a cooking pot from a few hundred years ago. It's not like you found a lost city or a chest of gold. In the grand scheme of things, it's a broken piece of someone's old kitchen. The real work is in the data from all those shards you've been finding, not the one thing that stayed in one piece.

paige5621mo ago

You said it's just a broken piece of someone's old kitchen. My friend spent months digging on a farm site, mostly finding nails. Then he pulled up a whole clay pipe with a little face on it. He just sat there holding it, totally quiet. It wasn't about money or big data in that second. It was holding the exact thing someone held and smoked from like 180 years ago. That connection is the win, and sometimes you need the whole object to feel it, not just the pieces.

sarahf991mo ago

But what if that feeling is the whole point? @paige562's friend wasn't just holding a pipe, he was holding a quiet moment across centuries. Maybe the data tells the big story, but the whole object lets you feel a tiny, real part of it.