Field school find from 2019 finally got cataloged

I dug up a fragmented Roman oil lamp in a test trench outside Nimes back in 2019, and last month the lab at Lyon finally finished conserving it. The potter's mark shows a workshop that only operated between 120 and 150 CE, which narrows our site's occupation window by almost thirty years. It's a tiny thing, maybe 8 centimeters across, but seeing it in the museum drawer made the whole dig feel worth it. Has anyone else had a backlog item pay off that late, or am I the only one sitting on old finds?

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julia_miller2419d ago

And that museum drawer moment is exactly what keeps me going through the boring sieving days. I had a tiny lead weight from a 2017 survey that sat in a box for four years until a grad student matched it to a known merchant's seal from Ostia. Suddenly we had proof this little rural site was trading with the big port, which changed how we read every coin and shard around it. You never know which scrap is going to flip the whole story, so I say let the backlog simmer, it's kind of like aged wine at this point.