That week in 2019 when my field school found 47 Roman nails and I lost my mind

I still think about this dig near York more than I should. It was a soggy Tuesday afternoon, I was 3 days into trench duty and mostly finding broken pottery and feeling useless. Then the trowel hit something solid and I scraped around it real slow, thinking it was just a rock. It was a nail. Not exciting alone, but by Friday our little grid had produced 47 of them, all clustered near what the site director said was probably a collapsed workshop floor. What got me was how ordinary it felt. Like, these were just nails. But someone hammered them into wood 1,800 years ago and that wood is gone and the nails are still here, just waiting in the dirt. I remember sitting on the edge of the trench eating a sad sandwich and just staring at the tray of rusted metal. No gold, no mosaics, but I felt like I'd touched a Tuesday in someone's life. Does that feeling ever go away, or do you still get weird about the boring stuff too?

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aaronroberts18d ago

Think how those nails ended up as the only record of someone's whole workday.