Hit 200 site visits in a month just from old pottery shards

I've been posting photos of random sherds I find on hikes for 2 years now and somehow a broken piece of Roman amphora from a ditch near my house got picked up by a history blog. Has anyone else had a random find suddenly blow up way more than the careful dig work?

3 comments

3 Comments

seth_singh201mo ago

Wait up, let me push back on this. Getting 200 visits from a random Roman sherd sounds cool, but that’s just luck, not proof it’s better than careful dig work. All those surface finds lack the context we get from proper excavation - no stratigraphy, no associated artifacts, no site mapping. A blog picked it up because it’s a flashy story, not because it adds real knowledge. Would you trade a month of methodical digging with actual scientific value for a viral weekend post that nobody remembers in two weeks?

grays131mo agoMost Upvoted

Did I accidentally delete my stratigraphy data or just my dignity on that last surface hunt?

wren6381mo ago

Oh for sure, I get what you're saying. I actually read an article a while back about a guy who found a medieval coin in his garden and it got all this press, but then archaeologists pointed out he'd basically just dug a hole without recording anything. They said the coin on its own tells you almost nothing. You don't know if it was dropped there in the 1300s or if someone's kid lost it 50 years ago. That's the whole problem with surface finds. A careful dig gives you a timeline, a story, a real piece of the past. A viral post is just noise. It's like comparing a selfie to a photograph - one is a moment, the other is a whole scene with context. Don't get me wrong, finding a Roman sherd is cool and all, but it's not replacing the real work. I'd rather have the month of digging that actually tells us something than a weekend of clicks that are gone by lunchtime Monday.