Question: whats the most interesting artefact you have found?

Jennifer Bates answered on 4 Nov 2016:

Hmmm…tough one! There are so many things to choose from. So, I’ll go for two of my favourite artefacts (though I think the plants are the coolest thing we find!). I’m an archaeologist because I want to think about how people like you and I would have lived in the past: what would people have been doing in their day-to-day lives 2000, or 5000 or even 150,000 years ago?

My first interesting artefact has to be the first thing I ever found, the artefact that made me want to be an archaeologist. We moved house when I was 7, and there was a mound in the garden so of course I dug a trench in it (duh!), and found a pot (in bits but complete). It wasn’t pretty – a thick, crumbly burnt pot with white spots (shell bits which help to hold the clay together, we call it a ‘temper’) – but I took it to my local archaeologist anyway. She amazingly told me it was Iron Age and a complete pot like this was quite rare, and invited me to come an excavation that weekend. That was it, hooked! And it made me think, what was life like in the past for the person who used that pot? From that pot we can start to think about what they were cooking, where they were living and where they went to get the clay to make the pot. So that pot is really special, both to me, and to the story of the local Iron Age life.

My second most interesting artefact was found in India. We think it was a loom weight, a ball of heavy clay added to the bottom of threads to hold them straight while you weave clothing. This one though had decoration, some dots and a few petal shapes, and we realised that they were made by someone pressing their fingernails into the clay before it dried. You could put your fingernails in the marks left by someone else’s nails 5000 years ago. That’s as close as we’re ever going to get to touching the past.