Shoutout to that 500-year-old pottery shard I nearly stepped on

I was out hiking near a creek bed in rural Kentucky last spring and almost crushed this tiny piece of pottery under my boot. Turns out it was a rim shard from a late Woodland period vessel, radiocarbon dated to around 1530. It mattered because that one shard helped link a seasonal camp site to a bigger settlement about 3 miles away that no one had connected before. Has anyone else found something that small that completely shifted how you saw a site?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_cora29d ago

A buddy of mine found a single arrowhead that changed a whole dig site.

the_wesley29d agoTop Commenter

My nephew once found a broken piece of pottery near a creek bed in Tennessee. That little shard led to a whole team coming out and finding an old Cherokee settlement. They ended up digging up cooking pits and stone tools that told a story nobody expected. It's funny how one small thing can change what you think you know about a place. Sometimes you just get lucky and trip over something that shifts the whole picture.