Changed my whole view on that 'empty' field outside Norwich

We were doing a field walk for a uni project, and I was sure the site was picked clean. My buddy insisted we grid a small patch with his trowel anyway. He found a perfect Roman coin about 15cm down, just sitting in the clay. I'd written the whole area off based on the surface finds. Now I grid everything, no matter how boring it looks. Anyone else had a site surprise them like that?

4 comments

4 Comments

angelarivera2mo ago

My archaeology prof always said the best stuff hides in plain sight.

the_max1mo ago

Yeah, but hold on @angelarivera, I gotta push back a little on this one. Thing is, "hiding in plain sight" doesn't mean every old thing is secretly important. Your prof probably meant that the really obvious stuff gets ignored because it's too ordinary. Like, people walk past a thousand-year-old foundation stone every day and just think it's a curb. But @alicecraig is right too - most stuff really is just normal, and mixing up common junk with actual finds is how people end up selling fake Roman coins on eBay. The trick is knowing which plain sight stuff actually matters, and that takes more than just saying "it's hiding.

alicecraig2mo ago

But come on, @angelarivera, isn't that just a fancy way of saying we overlook the boring stuff? Most things in plain sight are just normal things. That old pot in my attic isn't a hidden treasure, it's just a pot my grandma forgot. Sometimes a rock is just a rock, you know? It feels like people want to make everything into a big mystery when it's probably not.

gray_morgan2mo ago

Right, but @angelarivera's prof has a point. We get so used to seeing the same things every day that our brains just filter them out. It's not about making a normal pot into a magic artifact, it's about actually seeing it for what it is. The real skill is learning to look at the familiar stuff like you've never seen it before. That's when you notice the weird crack pattern or the odd glaze color that tells the actual story.