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Tried sifting my garden dirt for pottery bits after a rain and got way more than I expected
Last spring I started poking around the back corner of my lot in Dayton where the old topsoil gets dumped, mostly just to see if any glass or old bottle caps turned up. After a good soaking rain in April I grabbed a kitchen strainer and ran maybe two gallons of muddy dirt through it, and I pulled out 34 pieces of what looks like glazed stoneware, plus a rusted square nail and half a clay marble. I figured it was all junk from when the house got worked on in the 60s, but then I found a maker's mark on one shard and spent an evening on a pottery database trying to date it. Turns out a few pieces match a Ohio company that closed around 1912, which means the dirt in that corner got turned over way longer ago than I thought. The weird part is I almost skipped that spot because the grass there looks dead and boring. I keep wondering if I should dig a proper test pit or just leave it, since I know nothing about real field methods. Anybody here ever try backyard sifting and find something that actually dated to a real era?
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