Found a 200 year old plow in a creek bed and now I can't stop thinking about how we date farm tools

I was walking a creek near my property in southern Ohio last month and stumbled on this old iron plow blade sticking out of the mud. Got a guy from the local historical society to look at it and he said it's probably early 1800s based on the casting marks and shape. But here's the thing - another guy I know who digs old farm sites says plows are nearly impossible to date precisely unless they have a maker's stamp, which this one doesn't. So which side is right? Do we give too much weight to typology or should we be more careful about assuming age based on design changes? Anyone here ever dealt with a similar argument?

3 comments

3 Comments

simons2819d ago

Does it even matter if it's 200 years or 150?

the_paul19d ago

and that's the thing, it's like when you're trying to decide what to eat for dinner and you spend ten minutes going back and forth between two options that are both fine. the difference between 150 and 200 years feels huge in the moment but in the grand scheme of things it's just a rounding error. i notice this same pattern with people arguing about how long until the ice caps melt or when the stock market will crash again. everyone gets so hung up on the exact number that they miss the bigger problem which is that change is happening way faster than we can keep up with. it's like arguing about whether your car will break down at 80,000 miles or 100,000 miles when you should be thinking about whether you can even afford a car at all. so yeah, i think the specific number matters less than the fact that we're heading toward something bad and nobody wants to look at the whole picture.

oscar_ellis10d ago

Man I've been there with the dinner thing way too many times, last week I spent 20 minutes staring at the fridge deciding between leftover pasta and a sandwich and ended up just eating cereal because I got bored of deciding. It's funny how we do that with big stuff too, like I remember reading about some study that said we'd lose all the coral reefs by 2050 and then arguing with someone who insisted it was 2060, like okay buddy we're both going to be dead or close to it either way so maybe we should figure out what to do now instead of nitpicking the timeline. Your car analogy hit me hard because I'm literally driving a 2002 Civic with 180k miles that's held together with duct tape and hope, so I know exactly what you mean about focusing on the wrong number.