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Showerthought: a ranger in Utah showed me a 900 year old pot shard and I finally got why context matters more than the find
He pointed at the dirt around it and said the shard alone tells you nothing, but where it sits tells you who ate there and when. Made me wonder how many cool objects in museum cases lost their story the moment someone pocketed them?
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mary_patel591d ago
Small correction, but it's not that they lost their story so much as the story changed. Once you pull a pot out of the ground, all you really have left is a date and a guess. Where it sat, what it sat next to, the ash layer, the bones, that's the stuff that says who cooked what and for whom. A shard in a case is still cool, it just stops being evidence and turns into a decoration.
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