What is “Artifact of the Day?” In this post, you will find the YouTube video trailer explaining our new series and a full video transcript (with relevant sources and links).

YouTube Video

YouTube Video Transcript

Here, you will find the complete transcript of the video in the previous section with hyperlinked references/citations.

What happens when you find an artifact you’ve never seen before? 

Or what about artifacts that were part of the daily lives of people thousands of years ago, but aren’t really talked about today?

What about artifacts that make us rethink our assumptions about things like reading, identity, or even what we consider to be an artifact?

Clearly, there are a lot of artifacts out there, including many that have fascinating, and sometimes, even unexpected stories. 

Hi! I’m Dr. Smiti Nathan, and I’m an archaeologist. And our team wants to bring these stories to you.

So welcome to the new Artifact of the Day series! This bite-sized YouTube series will feature short videos, typically around 4–8 minutes, that zoom in on a single artifact or artifact type.

The idea for Artifact of the Day actually came from my kiddo, who was disappointed when his classroom stopped showing “Fact of the Day” videos.

That got me thinking: as an archaeologist, what if we created our own version for curious learners of all ages, but for artifacts? 

While we won’t be releasing a new video every single day, our goal is to build a big enough library so that anytime you want to learn something specific in just a few minutes, you have a video you can turn to.

We’re diving into not only how the artifact was discovered and used in the past, but also how we went about piecing together its story. We want to spotlight lesser-known artifacts that might not always make it into mainstream media or textbooks.

This series will premiere this September. The first five episodes will premiere weekly, and then going forward, we plan to release around three episodes monthly. 

We also want to hear from you.

Is there a fascinating artifact that you think should be more widely known? Or is there an artifact you’ve heard of or that we’ve mentioned in other videos that you want more information on?

Let us know in the comments or fill out the Google form in the description.

Also, if you’re an organization, like a museum or cultural center, or other entity, and you steward artifacts that you think could be featured, we would love to hear from you, too.

And finally, if you’re an educator, we’ll be testing free classroom-friendly resources for this series. You can find updates on that on our Patreon, which is completely free to join and access. Of course, if you’d like to support our work monetarily, we’d of course appreciate that too.

So if you’re ready to dive into this series, you can start with the video here.

Credits

Brooke Norton: Series Lead, Co-Producer, Researcher, Scriptwriter

Noor Hanania: Lead Video Editor, Peer Reviewer

Anya Gruber: Peer Reviewer

Sneh P. Patel: Peer Reviewer

Smiti Nathan: Director, Co-Producer, Support Video Editor, Researcher, Scriptwriter

Patreon Supporters

Thank you to our paid Patreon members for supporting the creation of this video:

Nancy Fulton, James D., Giancarlo Annese, Thomas Martin, Stuart A. Griffin, Tagg, Ann Brookens, Diana Madden

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