Took me 4 hours to figure out why my trowel kept hitting a 'rock' at the Roman fort site in Chester

Nina Ross · 2026-09-15T20:40:05.100239+00:00

Last month I was digging at a field school near Chester and kept scraping this hard lump in the dirt with my trowel. I assumed it was just a big cobble and kept working around it for almost 4 hours, getting more annoyed every pass. My supervisor finally came over, looked at it for two seconds, and said 'that's not a rock, that's a bit of Samian ware.' Turns out I had been troweling around a 1,800 year old piece of red slip pottery the whole time because I never bothered to wet-clean the surface. I felt like an idiot but also weirdly proud that my clumsy digging didn't break it. Has anyone else ever spent way too long ignoring something obvious in a trench?

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Took me 4 hours to figure out why my trowel kept hitting a 'rock' at the Roman fort site in Chester | Archaeology Discoveries - Topic Shares