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Overheard a grad student at the museum and it flipped my take on pottery shards
I always thought small pottery fragments were kind of boring, you know, like just broken bits with no story. But last Saturday at the Field Museum in Chicago, I heard this student talking to a curator about a single shard from a Mississippian site near Cahokia. She said they found traces of cacao on it, which meant trade networks way further south than anyone assumed for that time period. That blew my mind because I figured pottery was just for storing grain or water. Now I see those little pieces as tiny time capsules that can rewrite history with a lab test. Has anyone else had a common artifact suddenly become fascinating after hearing one specific detail?
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