The Earth Exhales

[poliphilo]

The ground smells sour where the tiles have been lying on it for the past 100 years. I thought I'd go dig in it and see if I could find any archaeology, but the top layer is cement and the layer under that is builders' rubble. The ivy and honeysuckle have gone from the side wall.  The workmen said they only intended to trim them back but everything just came away in their hands. I poked about in the empty bed and found a mummified rat.   Of course the roots are still there.

The robin who lives in the backyard is finding all sorts of interesting things in the debris.
 

Comments

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

That's about on a par with what I wind up finding on an average digging job!

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

I was hoping for a piece of Roman glass, a silver coin, something like that...

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

Yes. That's the story of my life...

I once spoke to a metal detectorist who'd found not one but two Bronze Age axes within a couple of years of each other. Considering that there have only been around 80 pieces of Bronze Age metalwork ever found in our area, that's not bad going, really.

I did find a hoard once on an excavation I was supervising. But it was a hoard of bone china dog kennels and other wacky early twentieth century tourist tat. Not quite the same as the Staffordshire Saxon treasures...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

How interesting. I wonder who buried it.

We live within a stone's throw of a Roman road, but- as far as I know- nothing from that period has ever turned up in the vicinity.

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It was a cache of tourist tat abandoned in a pit because it failed to sell, believe it or not. We dated it quite closely to the immediate Post-WWI period.

It's the weirdest thing I've ever dug up...

The miracle was that we chose to plonk our mini-digger right over the spot where it had been abandoned...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

What did you hope to find? What kind of site was it?

[endlessrarities.livejournal.com]

It was the field behind Burns Cottage in Alloway. We were looking for a field boundary, and any artefacts of 18th century date that could be held aloft as being 'from the time of Rabbie'.

Instead we got a load of abandoned memorabilia...

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

That's really funny.