Noticed a weird pattern with pottery shards at the old mill site

Last week, I was helping sort finds from the dig at the old mill site near Concord. We kept finding these tiny blue glazed pieces mixed in with the usual redware, which didn't make sense for the 1790s timeline. Last month, a volunteer found a 1920s soda bottle cap in the same layer. Three years ago, the initial survey marked it as a single-period site. Makes you wonder how much stuff gets churned up by later activity, right? Has anyone else had a site where the dating got totally scrambled by modern mixing?

3 comments

3 Comments

andrew_kelly13d ago

Actually, that mix of stuff makes perfect sense for a 1790s site. Later people were always poking around old places, dropping their own trash. It just shows continuous use, not a scrambled dating. That 1920s cap could have been dropped by a kid playing there decades ago, not from some big mix-up.

grace_johnson913d agoTop Commenter

I dug at a farmstead from the 1820s where we found a 1950s toy car right on the same floor level as the original dishes. Like @andrew_kelly said, it just means someone was out in that old barn long after the family left. You have to look at where most of the artifacts cluster to get the real story.

blake30222h ago

Exactly! Context is everything.