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Showerthought: That Roman kiln site changed how I dig test pits now
I was out at a Roman pottery kiln site near Lincoln last summer, just doing a routine fieldwalking survey. Three of us hit a patch of burnt clay and kept finding these tiny melted glass blobs that looked out of place for the era. Turns out we were standing on a medieval glassworking dump that got mixed in during plowing, and I wasted 2 days logging pottery that was totally wrong context. Now I always call in a geophysics team before I even break ground on any multi-period site. Has anyone else had a surface find totally throw off their site interpretation?
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patricianguyen17d ago
Dropped a whole weekend on a bogus medieval trench once. Turned out I was digging through a 19th century dump site that got plowed over an old Roman villa. Learned my lesson hard. Started doing a deep surface survey first. Walk the whole area in a grid, map everything weird looking. Red flags are anything melted, weird glass, or odd color changes in the soil. Saved me months of wasted work since.
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