That week in 2019 when nothing went right at the Roman site near Chester

I was part of a small dig out near Chester for a suspected Roman bathhouse, and one whole week was just cursed. First we hit what looked like a wall but turned out to be a natural limestone ridge, then the metal detector guy found a 17th century horse shoe instead of anything Roman. By Friday we had pulled up maybe 20 pottery sherds total, which is basically nothing for a site that should have been full of material. Has anyone else had a dig week where the ground just refused to cooperate?

3 comments

3 Comments

dylan_bell24d ago

That bit about the supervisor just tossing bottle caps into a pile without bagging them, that is exactly the mood. Sometimes you just have to accept the site is cursed and stop pretending every piece of crap is important. Gotta laugh or you will lose it.

caleb_thomas9324d ago

Digs are just life in miniature. Some weeks you dig, some weeks you find nothing but trash.

garcia.laura25d ago

Oh man, that sounds brutal! Honestly, I had a similar vibe on a dig in the Cotswolds back in 2018. We were supposed to be mapping out a medieval boundary ditch, but for four days straight, all we kept finding were these weird, modern plastic bottle caps. Like, someone must have dumped a whole trash bag there decades ago because they just kept turning up. The supervisor was so fed up by Wednesday, she just started throwing them into a pile without even bagging them. And then on Friday, we finally hit what we thought was a real feature, but it turned out to be an old water pipe from the 1970s. Tbh, sometimes the ground just wants to mess with you, and you gotta laugh about it or you'll cry.