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The mudlark guy on the Thames foreshore showed me a 300 year old pipe bowl and I finally got why context matters more than the object
I went on one of those guided mudlarking walks on the Thames foreshore near the Millennium Bridge last month, mostly because my brother wouldn't stop talking about it. Our guide pulled a clay pipe bowl out of the mud, stamped with a maker's mark, and said it was from around 1720. What got me was not the pipe itself, he has buckets of them, but the fact that he could point to the exact layer of river silt it came from and tie it to a specific stretch of waterfront that burned down in 1748. A museum would put that pipe in a case with a little card, but out on the mud he could show me the whole story of the street it fell off of. I always thought archaeology was about finding the coolest object, and it turns out the coolest object is worthless without where it sat and what was next to it. He said something that stuck with me, that a pipe bowl with no context is just a pipe bowl, but a pipe bowl in a burned layer is a Tuesday in 1748. Now I look at every artifact story I read online and check if they even say where it came from. Has anyone else done one of these foreshore walks, and did your guide say which stretch of the river is best for older stuff?
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