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A museum docent in Tulsa showed me a 400-year-old broken pot and it changed how I see every shard I pick up
I was at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa last month on a slow Tuesday and struck up a chat with a docent named Harold who was maybe 70 and had been volunteering there for 12 years. I told him I'd been surface hunting arrowheads and pottery pieces on family land in Osage County for a couple seasons and had a coffee can full of plain brown body sherds I figured were junk. He walked me over to a case with a Caddo jar that was shattered into like 30 pieces and glued back together, cracks and all, and said something I keep thinking about: "A plain sherd tells you people ate here. A decorated one tells you they cared about how." That hit different because I'd been tossing the plain ones aside looking for points and painted stuff. He said archaeologists want the boring pieces too, since they help date a site and show everyday use, not just the fancy trade goods. I went home and dumped out my can and actually looked at them for once, noticing temper grit and a couple rims with fingerprints still in the clay. I've got maybe 15 rim sherds now I used to think were nothing. Has anyone here ever had a museum person or archaeologist flip your thinking on what counts as a real find?
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