That pottery shard from a dig in Ohio turned out to be way older than I thought

I picked up a small piece of pottery near a creek in Hocking Hills last spring and figured it was just some old farm junk from the 1800s. Turns out a local archaeologist looked at it and said the shell tempering means it's probably Hopewell culture, like 2,000 years old. Anyone else ever had a random surface find turn out to be way more significant than you guessed?

2 comments

2 Comments

willow_ellis25d ago

Yeah get it properly documented and don't clean it too much. Those Hopewell finds are rare as hell to just stumble on.

johnthompson24d ago

I actually found a Hopewell point once back in 2007 down near the Scioto River and I thought I was the king of the world until my buddy who's an archaeologist looked at it and said "yeah that's just a broken arrowhead someone dropped last week." Real ego check right there. But he did tell me the same thing you're saying now about documentation and not messing with the patina. So I'm just laughing at myself because I went from thinking I had a museum piece to realizing I probably tripped over someone's lost keychain.