This video is part of my series, “Life of an Archaeologist,” where I share parts of my life and answer your questions about being an archaeologist. In this post, you will find the YouTube video where I chat about the coolest thing I ever found, as well as 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.

Intro

 So what’s the coolest thing you’ve ever found? I get this question a lot.

Pop culture tends to paint the picture of the lone archaeologist coming across a find and immediately realizing what it is and how it’s going to just change everything.

I found a lot of cool things. It’s just that the stories behind these discoveries are a little different than what we might see in pop culture.

If you’re curious to know the real story, or at least my stories, about the coolest thing I’ve ever found, Then let’s go back to the beginning.

Noticing

Too far.

Let’s go to 2006. I’m on my first archaeology project, and we’re digging on the Great Hungarian Plain. We’re in a farm field surrounded by sunflowers, digging a 6,000 year old house. It’s also really hot. But even without the heat, I’m feeling a bit confused, unsure of what I’m doing in the trench. Fair enough, it’s my first dig and I’m here to learn.

One day we’re digging and we come across a bunch of ceramics, more so than the ceramic quantities that we’re used to. We call over our field supervisor and she notices bones. She then calls over the directors of the project and they take over. They reveal a burial and a now broken ceramic vessel underneath the house we were exploring.

While this was certainly an important find, it also highlighted and perhaps foreshadowed my complex relationship with archaeological discoveries. You see, there are three things that happen with discoveries that make them not so straightforward, at least to me.

The first is noticing. With any type of archaeological work, and this includes diggings, surveys, lab work, we’re really trying to figure out what’s interesting and what’s not so interesting so we can separate those two out, and that’s highly subjective.

Let’s take excavation. If it was just separating out artifacts from the dirt, it would be fairly straightforward, but it’s not. In the dirt, there are rocks. Sometimes they look like other artifacts. Sometimes you don’t know if they ended up there naturally or someone put them there. Sometimes the dirt changes and then you have to sort out what’s happening. Then there are routes to dig through, rodent holes that confuse you, and things like charcoal, shells, and more rocks to sort through.

Let’s say you’ve never excavated before or maybe you’ve never excavated in a certain region so you’re not sure what’s important and what’s not. For example, you might join a dig at a place you’ve never worked at before and there are hundreds of shells and you’ve been told just to throw them in the back dirt pile because they’ve been studied already.

But there also happens to be a handful of shells that nobody knows about with tiny holes in them. And these shells actually were strung together to make jewelry. There are also a few number of other shells that are shaped differently and actually come from hundreds of kilometers away, and that’s important.

No one noticed these types of shells before, so that would be a pretty big discovery, but there’s a lot going on, and it makes it challenging to notice important shells that look so similar to other not so important shells.

So learning how to notice things is really important and that usually comes with experience and training, but also who to turn to for help, which brings us to the second thing, which is collaborating.

Collaborating

Now when it comes to discoveries, noticing and collaborating go hand in hand.

Let’s say you’ve committed to this archaeology thing and you have a few summers of fieldwork under your belt. You’re now a supervisor, let’s say of excavation, and you’re not just digging, you’re supervising people digging too. You actually might not be digging so much anymore, and instead you’re making labels for finds, capturing GPS coordinates, taking notes, and answering questions about what your team is finding.

I remember getting a call on our walkie talkies in Ethiopia years ago. We’re in the mountainous area of Tigray region of Ethiopia. Some of us are doing survey, looking for archeological sites, and some of us are excavating one site.

One day, my friend Ioana radios the survey team to let us know something interesting is happening. She is trench supervisor, and one of her teammates, Mohamed, just showed her something unusual that turned up in the sieve.

Ioana tells us it’s an artifact caked in dirt but it looks like it could be jewelry. Turns out it was. It was a ring with a reddish stone and some sort of bull design. After the excavation was over, we brought in a conservator to help clean and restore the ring and another specialist to confirm the stone was carnelian. That was my guess all along.

We also brought in other scholars to help us figure out the composition of the ring, and we learned that while the overall composition looked Roman, the design did not, and likely came from elsewhere. The ring and other artifacts from that season helped us figure out that we were working at a site that had multiple cultural and religious influences, and likely traded with people and places from far away.

Interpreting

 That brings us to the third thing, which is interpreting.

It’s one thing to notice something, it’s a whole other thing to interpret what it might mean. For me and many other archaeologists, interpretation is integral to what makes a discovery significant.

Let’s take Aqir al-Shamoos in Oman. The site was noticed by locals, especially two elderly brothers that lived nearby the site. They called the local heritage ministry and said, hey, we think the site is important. So various teams of archaeologists came by and looked at the site, but the archaeologist didn’t think it was that important.

When our team went out, we noticed a lot of objects of the same material, soft stone. They were often broken and just rough looking all around, but it turned out to be really important. You see, we’ve had hundreds of these items, and after surveying the site a bit more systematically and bringing out a softstone specialist, we realized that these objects were in different stages of production.

In Oman, softstone was super important and traded in the antiquity and we know they came from this area in Oman. But we didn’t know where these objects were produced. Given the material that we found and our interpretation of it, this turned out to be the oldest known softstone production site in Arabia.

Interpretation takes time and that usually happens months or even years later after we first notice something and collaborate with others to get some help.

Discoverer?

It also makes the idea of the discoverer tricky.

In Hungary, who discovered the burial? Was it the field school students who noticed the ceramics? The trench supervisor who also noticed bones? Or the dig directors who excavated the area and revealed the burial?

In Ethiopia, who discovered the ring’s significance? Was it Mohamed who first noticed the object? My friend Ioana who noticed some of the details through the caked dirt? Our dig director who paid for a conservator who then cleaned the ring to show significant details? The stone idea who confirmed the gem came from far away, or the scholars who explained the Roman but not really design of the ring?

In Oman, who discovered the first known production site of soft stone? Was it the local brothers who felt that the site was old and told someone? The local heritage officers who kept bringing out archaeologists, even though team after team said it wasn’t important? Our team member, I think it was Ioana again, who called attention to all the rough softstone at the site. Our director, who along with the softstone specialist and myself, surveyed the area in depth to locate artifacts at different production stages?

This is everything that goes in my head when someone asks me that question: What’s the coolest thing I’ve ever found?

The Coolest Thing

But honestly, I think people just might be wondering if I had that pop culture moment where I’m in the field and I come across something and I know that it’s somewhat important.

In my 20 years of doing archaeology, I do not have that one defining moment, but it honestly kind of makes me happy. It kind of takes the pressure off of finding the thing when I’m doing field work and just helps me slow down and noticing.

In this season of life, this mindset helps me be a better project co director and support my team and the students who are coming out, as well as the local community. It also makes it both fun and critical to collaborate with others to give things and places the best interpretation possible.

There’s also a bit of magic, dare I say, to know that a discovery can happen even when you’re not in the field. It could be having an aha moment when doing a literature review and certain dots connect. Or working with people from other fields by compiling all sorts of data and seeing a significant pattern. Or it could even be an email letting you know that the thing you found in the field months ago and that finally has been radiocarbon dated comes from a really interesting time period.

As cliche as it sounds, the coolest thing I ever found is that process or journey of figuring out a discovery through training those noticing skills, collaborating with some really awesome people, and interpreting all sorts of data to create these intriguing and evidence based stories about our past.

Credits

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