Botched a trench at a dig site in Arizona last spring

I was digging a test trench near a Hohokam site in Phoenix and my shovel clipped what I thought was a rock, but it was actually a whole ceramic pot caked in dirt. Had to spend two hours with a brush and dental pick trying to piece it back together, lesson learned about going slow. Has anyone else accidentally broken something important on a dig and managed to fix it?

3 comments

3 Comments

the_robert19d ago

That pot was probably sitting there for 800 years and I wrecked it in one swing. It made me think about how often we rush through stuff in daily life thinking it's no big deal, then end up breaking something that took ages to build. Like when you're trimming hedges and snip through a branch without looking, or rushing a home repair and crack a tile you can't replace. There's this weird respect you develop for slow, steady work when you've had to glue back a piece of someone's dinner bowl from a thousand years ago.

mila_harris19d ago

800 years and some guy with a shovel just walks up and ends the whole thing in one go. Makes you wonder if that pot had a bucket list it never got around to finishing. Probably was thinking to itself "just 200 more years and I'll be the oldest pot in the museum gift shop." Now it's just a jigsaw puzzle in a dusty box somewhere.

verawhite19d ago

Honestly that pot's bucket list probably just had "stay intact for one more Tuesday" and it still failed. (I feel like the museum gift shop part is optimistic though, most ancient pots end up as a bookmark in someone's thesis paper.) You know some grad student is going to spend the next three years writing about "the tragic fragmentation of a utilitarian object" while the real tragedy is that they'll never know what ancient soup tasted like.