Dug at a site near Rome for 6 weeks and we pulled 1,247 pottery shards, 3 of them changed everything
I spent last summer on a dig just outside Rome with a small crew of 8 people. For 6 weeks we pulled nothing but plain brown shards, about 1,247 pieces total, and I was starting to think we picked the wrong field. Then on day 39, right before lunch, a volunteer named Dana flipped over a piece with a maker's stamp still visible on the base. That one shard dated the whole layer to 40 BC, which pushed our site 200 years earlier than the textbook said. The other two stamped pieces came up in the same square meter the next day. I still think most digs are 95 percent boredom and 5 percent getting hit in the chest by real history. So here's my real question: has anyone else had a single find rewrite the timeline of a site you were working? And did your director admit it or fight it?